ENSEMBLES - A Way to Approach Art Today by CAHF

E n s e m b l e s A Way to Approach Art Today

Tabel of Content 3 Introduction Jan De Vree

Essays 13 23 49

M HKA Ensembles: Towards an Open Multimedia Exchange Platform for Contemporary Art Kristof Michiels Approaching Art through Ensembles Bart De Baere To Think What We Are Doing Dieter Roelstraete

Statements 61 67 73

Zip, Zap, Save & Safeguard: bien étonnés de se trouver… Marc Jacobs The Long and Winding Road… Tom Evens Toward Process Management of Public Space Maja Coltura, Miek De Kepper, David Vande Cauter

Cases

Ensembles – A Way to Appoach Art Today Evi Bert

83 94 105 115 127 139

Case Case Case Case Case Case

1: L’Internationale 2: Jimmie Durham Archive 3: Hommage Bernd Lohaus 4: Allan Sekula / Docker’s Museum 5: Graphology 6: Panamarenko / Workstation Biekorfstraat

150 Colophon

Introduction Jan De Vree M HKA sets as its core task to ‘present an art hypothesis to the public’ or, in other words, to ‘mediate a vision of art’. The entire museum is focused on content and how to make it public. To achieve this M HKA is building its own digital platform, allowing it to focus on engagement, information, insight and what connects them. This platform, M HKA Ensembles, supports the museum’s efforts to always ground its dealings with art in insight. M HKA wants to make such insight immediately available to visitors in the museum and on the Internet. This book offers a first presentation of M HKA Ensembles; it describes the point of departure, gives examples from the test phase and introduces elements of the theoretical framework through notions such as immaterial heritage, public space and Creative Commons. The art hypothesis is a vision of art formulated by the museum and presented to the world. A classic museum arranges the artistic past into a ‘master narrative’, a canon. That canon gives the impression of being final and unchangeable. A museum for contemporary art, on the other hand, must continually challenge its views on the past, present and future; it must test its visions of artists, of the public, of society. In that way it can enrich, reconsider and reformulate its insight. The vision of art that the museum formulates therefore lives and evolves, continuously gaining power. With M HKA Ensembles the museum wants to make this vision more visible and ‘let art speak’, as it were. To formulate its art hypothesis M HKA takes as its starting point the vision of artists whom it finds important. This means that everything these artists do, everything they consider to be part of their practice, is of interest. These artists’ works require particular space and attention, but their preliminary studies and documents, editions, artists’ books and other printed matter,

texts, blogs, websites and secondary sources are often equally important manifestations of their artistic energy. How artists position themselves in the world and present their work is also significant. When the different approaches that make up an artist’s vision are connected clusters may be created, and when related works, or clusters of works, are brought together they may create ensembles. With the M HKA Ensembles application, a sustainable infrastructure is established within the museum’s collecting practice. It aims at exposing correlations between works and how they are layered precisely in such clusters and ensembles, as well as the research being conducted around them.

M HKA Ensembles can also be used for public mediation to generate additional value. The museum’s mediation department is involved in the building and editing of ensembles from the very beginning, which always brings the public into the equation. Mobile applications for public access via smartphones and iPads offer museum visitors additional information and contextualisation and provides immediate access to the museum’s collections, allowing visitors to compose their own individual tours, as it were. An Internet platform is being developed simultaneously. The Ensembles application is crucial

Allowing the artwork to ‘come to life’ by contextualising it and providing information and insight makes even more sense when you work outside the confines of your own institution. In those cases, more collaboration can lead to better results. M HKA Ensembles will gradually be expanded, also internationally. The application was initially deviced to meet M HKA’s own needs. In the longer term the challenge is to make this database available to small and medium-sized organisations in Belgium and abroad, which will then be able to benefit from the instruments and expertise that have been developed. After one year of experimentation we now present this publication as a first attempt at synthesising our findings and achievements. The book consists of three sections. The first comprises three essays in which the museum formulates its vision. In his text, Kristof Michiels, who conceived M HKA Ensembles, takes a closer look at the position and social relevance of museums in today’s networked society, and how the current wave of digitalisation has influenced their work. In Approaching Art through Ensembles, M HKA’s director Bart De Baere elaborates on the notions of ‘ensembles’, ‘thinking in ensembles’, and ‘art hypothesis’. He traces the recent paradigm shift from encyclopaedic thinking and object-orientated art collecting to a more intersubjective mode of collecting, starting from the complexity of the individual artist’s practice. In the last essay, former M HKA curator Dieter Roelstraete briefly revisits his rewarding experience of curating exhibitions and elaborates ‘thinking-in-action’ as a basis for collecting practice, as it was formulated in the Jubilee collection catalogue published by M HKA for its twentieth anniversary in 2007. For the second part of this book M HKA has commisioned external players to make powerful and illuminating statements. Marc Jacobs, director of FARO, the Flemish Interface for cultural heritage, writes about how crucial digital documentation can be for supporting innovation and facilitating work in the field of Arts and Heritage. Tom Evens, affiliated IBBT-MICT, Ghent University, states that museums, in their digital strategies, are often impeded by restrictive copyright legislation. He calls for a balance between the rights of the author and that

Introduction — Jan De Vree

‘Organising connections’ is therefore an important part of giving shape to the art hypothesis. Ensembles can be created and structured in the most diverse ways, starting with the initial entry of information and metadata into the system. With each action the ensemble continues to grow. Over time, this method can expand into a new dynamic museum practice. For instance, when an exhibition is being prepared, information that used to be scattered everywhere can now be better organised thanks to this working instrument. Consequently, the different departments of the museum are given equal access to workable information, and ‘preserved’ insight can be used in the formulation of new exhibitions and create the basis for another, more organic type of collaboration between departments. The application can also serve as a source of information for scholarly research. Moreover, M HKA Ensembles can be fed by external research, which can provide insight into its own collection. Wouter Davidts’s academic research on the work of Luc Deleu, by whom the M HKA has a large cluster of works in its collection, will thus be fully incorporated into M HKA Ensembles.

for the informing, presenting, and social embedding of the collection and the vision of art that it expresses and represents.

of the user via ‘open content licenses’, with Creative Commons as a prime example. From LOCUS, the Flemish Interface for local cultural policy, we have commissioned a rephrasing of the idea of Bildung in today’s terms.

Introduction — Jan De Vree

Finally, through six case studies Evi Bert, coordinator of the library and documentation centre at M HKA, offers insight into the ensembles that the museum has already developed. These may be very diversely structured, and also originate from different needs. They may start with an international collaboration such as l’Internationale, in which M HKA along with several European museums and artists’ archives is thematising the diversity and complexity of contemporary art, or else from a specific exhibition at the museum, such as Ship of Fools by Allan Sekula. Opportunities may be furnished by the desire to hold onto a singular event, such as the Hommage Bernd Lohaus in honour of the deceased Antwerp-based artist, but also by the enlargement and development of a knowledge centre on a complete oeuvre, such as that of Jimmie Durham (for whom M HKA has just made a large retrospective), or by the need to provide digital access to a monographic ensemble such as Panamarenko’s Workstation Biekorf.

Luc Deleu, VIPCITY 1999-2004, detail (ÂŠimage: M HKA)

E n s e m b l e s Essays

M HKA Ensembles: Towards an Open Multimedia Exchange Platform for Contemporary Art

In late 2010, M HKA began an open exercise to develop a futureoriented digital strategy to best estimate the potential and challenges of the digital revolution. The concrete action plan that followed focused on setting up technological steps while considering the effects on the museum as a whole. Today, M HKA is implementing this plan systematically; the first concrete result being the establishment of M HKA Ensembles (http:// ensembles.org). M HKA Ensembles

M HKA Ensembles has now been used within the organization for a year. This in-house developed web application has relied on close, continuous involvement of many departments across the museum. We wanted a sustainable means to store, retain, and represent the multiple contexts surrounding our works of art. The goal, in terms of the end-user, was to bring a multi-layered story to different target groups while resisting reductionist meaning. Respect for reality and its subjectivity was considered more important than the illusory taxonomic compilation that characterizes many existing databases. Selecting and defining suitable ensembles has been a key focus. We started off by culling a focused and manageable number of object collections; some of them were chosen from a single artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perspective (e.g. Panamarenko, Luc Deleu, Paul De Vree), others selected per theme, representing a collection

M HKA Ensembles: Towards an Open Multimedia Exchange Platform for Contemporary Art â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Kristof Michiels

Kristof Michiels

segment (e.g. the Vrielynck collection) or an exhibition (e.g. A Rua, Spirits of Internationalism). On the basis of available text and multimedia material (pictures, sound, film, email conversations, publications, interviews, etc.), and after an initial registration, we try to capture as many different layers of meaning as possible – not in a final, definitive sense – but rather reflecting the inevitable unfinished nature of such work. We see it as a process instead of a finite product.

In collecting the material to be taken up within M HKA Ensembles, we strive for a broad engagement within the organization. With input decentralized, each employee may contribute and request information. Objects can be annotated formally and informally. Extensive reflections and brief observations perfectly complement each other in M HKA Ensembles; we highlight and encourage these additions through a concept borrowed from social media: The Life Stream. Each artist or artwork is linked to a chronological stream that documents and structures the current thoughts on these subjects. Overviews allow users to see what information is entered into the system, simultaneously inviting others to add new information and thus integrating the platform into the museum’s overall operations. The content manager – previously responsible for all substantive data input – now instead plays an important coaching role of guiding the entire process. Furthermore, the objects may also be annotated by external experts (such as curators, researchers or even the artists themselves).

In addition, a public desktop version has recently been launched from which information can be retrieved before or after a visit to the museum. The information available to the public is limited due to copyright and/or permission restrictions or the sensitive nature of the content. As a museum, we will continue to play our curatorial role and make available the most relevant information within these constraints. The public mediation department, who not only actively participate in the content creation within M HKA Ensembles, act as a digital curator as well, and assist in selecting relevant material during exhibitions. For every exhibition, a specific angle is sought at the mediation level. For example, with the Europalia Brazil exhibition, A Rua, artists gave statements about their work that were turned into short films and made available via the public application. While directly allowing the public to annotate and contribute is not yet possible today, visitors can share information via social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The undeniable potential for public digital participation is a priority for the coming years. Digital Ensemble Thinking at M HKA: Innovative in What Way?

The integration of knowledge and the role the public plays refers directly to the important function of M HKA Ensembles in our museum. We want to bridge the gap between museological thinking in terms of ‘insights’ and ‘art hypotheses’, and what

M HKA Ensembles: Towards an Open Multimedia Exchange Platform for Contemporary Art — Kristof Michiels

The selected artworks, artists, exhibitions and ensembles relate to our permanent collection, but in most cases exceed the bounds of our holdings. Links to reference material are essential in order to collect broader insights. In this respect, particular attention is merited by the ensemble Jimmie Durham. Durham is considered one of the museum’s key artists and his works are well-represented in the permanent collection. In preparation for the exhibition organized by M HKA this year, a cluster – with over a thousand works – was created giving a detailed overview of Durham’s artistic production. Numerous texts, writings, interviews, correspondence, comparative images and shorter statements from and about the artist were also linked. With this effort the museum supported not only the preparation for and the actual exhibition; it further encourages recognition of Durham’s work within the institution, while sharing it with the public in an enduring manner.

And access is not limited to the professional. Public usage of M HKA Ensembles is also important. We developed a mobile web application that is accessible from any recent generation smartphone or tablet computer. By placing QR codes among other markers (such as a unique inventory number), we link through to additional information and resources (a publicly available selection of the process described above). Once a visitor has found information on a particular piece, it is easy to navigate to other artworks – or to an overview of the exhibition to which the work belongs. In the coming years, we expect a greater share of our public to own portable telecommunication and computer devices. The bring-your-own-device approach seems an acceptable strategy (and M HKA has a number of kiosk devices available in the museum). To support mobile usage throughout the museum M HKA has installed a highperformance and open Wi-Fi network.

we choose or manage to convey to our audiences. All too often, museums present works as autonomous objects per se, or reduce their complexity to an oversimplified, formalized story. Alas, at this point in time the digital function of many institutions does not sufficiently remedy this.

Creating content is neither an afterthought nor the work of one specific person. It happens organically and is part of the museum’s broad-scale operations. Ultimately, M HKA Ensembles can extend the community model when it will be able to process data originating from outside the museum (or be processed by other applications). Currently, M HKA Ensembles remains an on-going development supported by an evolving organization and a basic methodology. Keywords are in this respect ‘commitment’, ‘engagement’, ‘insight’, ‘understanding’, ‘clarity’ and ‘community interaction’. We incorporate a broader community model by allowing external experts, such as the artist, other institutions, curators and specialists, to add narratives and meanings. Eventually, the public will be able to contribute too; though it requires a clear strategy and contractual framework to preserve and maximize reproduction rights in the public domain (e.g. one possible example is the Creative Commons model).

M HKA Ensembles is, so to speak, in many ways connected within a network. Bringing the artwork to life through connecting and contextualizing makes sense only when extended beyond the boundaries of the institution. With M HKA Ensembles, we want to position ourselves globally; content will be as mobile and comprehensive as possible in disseminating from and to M HKA. Our hope is to collaborate with other institutions on content, taking up an aggregate and hub role in information flow. In technical terms, we want the ensemble bank to interact with external applications. Facilitated by an open API (application programming interface), data exchange with external applications guarantees a natural information exchange between user-friendly systems. We are also working on making the M HKA Ensembles application available as an independent service to the larger cultural sector. We aim for a low-cost, sustainable, and integrated solution. The current developments offered by open (mobile) web, as opposed to specific applications per platforms, and the service model of cloud computing make this possible. We hope to be able to advance further than existing commercial systems. The End of Traditional Collection Registration? Towards a New Appropriate Model within a Digital Culture

Museums have since their inception in the 19th century always described their collections. In most cases, the focus has been on the technical data necessary for proper collection management. Digital forms of collection management have emerged from the successive waves of automation (1970s), and especially, the advent of the Internet (1990s). Presently, almost all museums describe and disclose their digital collection. Yet, not without challenges. Due to a deficiency in technical knowledge, museums’ documentation practices make insufficient use of the opportunities offered by the digital age.

M HKA Ensembles: Towards an Open Multimedia Exchange Platform for Contemporary Art — Kristof Michiels

M HKA Ensembles is not a traditional collection documentation system. For collection management purposes, the museum continues to use a dedicated tool (in our case Adlib). With M HKA Ensembles the goal is to capture and visualize the multiple meanings of an artwork or collection. With existing applications such as Adlib and TMS (The Museum System) the focus is more on traditional technical description. New collective forms of knowledge-gathering necessitate new forms of output. With M HKA Ensembles we seek new ways to access thoughtful narratives that support diverse and multi-layered stories (e.g. non-linear, integrating multimedia). An example in another field that provided inspiration is an open-source experiment in new journalism: http://livingstories.googlelabs.com. In that case news stories slowly emerge by combining the activities from many journalists. Some of them closely collaborate on a news story, each adding elements to the larger picture. Others publish the news elsewhere on the web. Their efforts are aggregated and recombined into one dynamic and interactive news story. Other sources of inspiration were Twitter.com, Facebook.com and Storify.com.

Rather than achieving an encyclopaedic database with traditional collection registration tools, we seek to create an excellent but versatile description of the most pertinent key objects. Output criteria developed for the principal community/communities will keep stakeholders central. We will continually test and readjust these group(s) and rely on a partner-commitment model as opposed to traditional customersupplier models. We foresee information guides and curators rather than gatekeepers.

Even today collection registration primarily remains an in-house task for collection managers and curators, with as a logical consequence, an emphasis on quantitative and taxonomic classification. With the almost exclusive presence of purely technical descriptions with an emphasis on a single dominant interpretation; the broader context, the process, or avenues for interaction are rarely included. The result is often muddled: less useful information for the public, inadequate information for professionals.

So why not actively dare to think this through and give the digital aspect within museums, within our activities, the place it deserves? Without minimizing the physical confrontation of an artwork: digital versions are more accessible to a worldwide public than the original physical object. Museums can also reach interested parties who do not necessarily have a physical relationship with our institution. Where a connection, however, does exist we can strengthen it through digital channels. Increasingly, we will be faced with a new online public that does not necessarily have an affinity for the historical process of collecting. Conversely, should there be a heightened interest, we should be in a position to make our collection narrative(s) more transparent and easy to formulate. The boundaries of our collections – certainly within a less object-oriented focus –fade. It is hard to identify where collections start and where they end. An open and hybrid approach replicates this borderless nature and will stimulate

These new digital contexts legitimize the critical question of how we handle information. The ability to store large amounts of data, make it searchable, distribute it, and make it graphic have increased exponentially. The challenge therein is to create new data models for our collections that will evolve into effective and sustainable knowledge environments – previously unimaginable environments that will offer space for multiple meanings, transversal narratives or multiple relationships between objects. All with the understanding that the ‘truth’, or the ‘art hypothesis’, will always escape our grasp to some degree. If we dare to open these models, they offer new opportunities for collaboration between departments, between curators, and can undoubtedly lead to new and interdisciplinary meanings. A new form of digital collection management should be seen as a means, not as an end in itself. It is a process that – through maximizing a broad interpretation of use of the collections – should help museums fulfil their larger social missions. It is therefore advisable to strive for the establishment of knowledge-rich environments that allow for descriptions, explanation, and interpretations of references to various historical and cultural contexts and discourse. In an approach that recognizes the need for basic registration and other classic data, but at the same time tempers their authority through the use of alternative forms of analysis, and dares to accommodate content from both specialists and non-specialists. The challenge is to find systems that reconcile the classical expert and research content with newer, diverse forms of object interpretation; models that autonomous user groups can utilize to interpret their own clusters. The challenges are great. But it is important that we take them and document the results, sharing our efforts with each other as a sector.

M HKA Ensembles: Towards an Open Multimedia Exchange Platform for Contemporary Art — Kristof Michiels

Within an increasingly digital culture, museum institutions are threatened with issues of relevance. Their limited capacity to innovate is expressed not only in terms of collection description but also in an insufficient recognition of the effect of the digital shift on society. Nearly all existing museum practices are undergoing a reassessment. The distinction between high-low categories is blurred and also problematizes the traditional archiving role of the museum. A museum continues as a cultural force, of course, but is now part of a much wider network. We must presume to recognize our digital function by building physical and virtual bridges and engaging in an open and transparent dialog with reciprocal institutions, with other organizations and artists — and with our public. The open and reflexive platform formed by M HKA Ensembles is already an important start, and we want to continue our efforts into the future.

forms of virtual collection mobility between diverse users. Challenges – like ownership and confidentiality – exist for the public as do opportunities to engage and participate.

Yang Fudong, Forest Diary, 2000 (ÂŠimage: M HKA)

Approaching Art through Ensembles Bart De Baere

An approach based on modes of existence might lead to a situation in which museums acquire not only ‘works’ (sculptures, paintings, drawings, installations) but also ensembles. Relations between constituent parts of ensembles might be specified, as well as the possibilities of exhibiting fragments, separate elements or one single element, the possibilities of including an ensemble in a more extended context or the possibilities of concentrating and dissolving it. We would no longer be thinking of a standard framework with permissible deviations, but instead of a network of relationships that might be realised but does not have to be. Small peripheral elements, which for instance often appear in works by Mark Manders, would be considered desirable rather than problematic. Artists would, in the future, be able to permeate the museum’s ‘permanence’ with a desire for change.1

1. Bart De Baere, ‘Joining the Present to Now’, in Kunst & museumjournaal, 1994–1995, Volume 6, double new year issue, p.70.

The Ensemble: A Retrospective

This Is the Show… itself arose from the observation during Documenta IX that there was no public space for some of the relevant young artists of the time. Gabriel Orozco, who at that time still worked in the street, Mona Hatoum, whose work seemed to be more about process than slides of her work were able to show, the fascinating oeuvre of Honoré d’O that had not yet surfaced in the art world but already flourished in his studio and in various alternative locations, the dancing proposals of the Austrian ManfreDu Schu; all these were ultimately left out, although the young Documenta curator would have desired otherwise. The work of one of their peers, Eran Schaerf, which was there, slotted between two Aue-Pavilions, remained practically unseen at this Documenta. The specific complexity in the approach of artists like Jimmie Durham and Cildo Meireles was barely noticed as such within the well-constructed exhibition that Documenta IX nonetheless was. A construction that, moreover, consciously sought to attain diversity in terms of the artworks presented and thereby a more intense composition of the exhibition.

The notion of ‘ensemble’ appeared from around the corner at the end of this line of thinking. Whereas This Is the Show… expressed the intuition for a different possibility to show art, the term ‘ensemble’ expressed the need for a different insight into what artists do. Neither the spatial presentation, nor the conceptual approach felt revolutionary. They simply felt more close to art. The impression was that the art world had for a whole century already – the then not quite finished twentieth century – ignored the complexity of art and of artists’ approaches to it. The early avant-garde was part of this, although the project focused primarily on young artists who appeared to be offering something urgent, with a raison d’être that had not yet found its visibility. The project tried to create this visibility, scantily or not at all justified in terms of philosophy and art history and even less supported by the interest in process and the relational aesthetic that were still to come. This visibility was instead negatively determined – by the unacceptable reduction of art to products of a Bonfire-of-Vanities-style yuppie-ism, with its new money, its applied technologies and its short attention span. We are now far away from the moment of This Is the Show… and the initial use of the ‘ensemble’ notion. We can now see – or hope – that the surge of object-based art, from the Neue Wilde to the neo-minimal sculpture that was to opposite it, was at the same time the beginning of a new phase and the end of an era.

Approaching Art through Ensembles — Bart De Baere

It is remarkable how not only the status but also the vitality of words can change. The meaning of the term ‘ensemble’ should be obvious after two decades of fuzzy logic, rhizomatic thinking, processual and performative action, ‘change management’ and the dematerialisation of the Self and of our common heritage. In the early nineties ‘ensemble’ was still a fluffy notion, used as a non-definition to hint at other possible approaches to art, different from the static structures arising from the compelling idea of the artwork as the central unit of art. Just as This Is the Show and the Show Is Many Things in 1994 was in a certain sense a naïve exhibition, it was in a certain sense a naïve act to promote the term ‘ensemble’ as a hypothesis at the end of the preparatory text. The text acknowledged an insight that was up for grabs, and tried to observe it rather than formulate a critique of the system that eclipsed this insight.

This Is the Show… is now seen as one of the first process-based exhibitions, but was actually derived from the intuitive notion that the space for art could be addressed in a radically different way, i.e. as a modulated ‘time-space’ where a sense of eternity might be juxtaposed with the singular moment and where art would not proceed from the isolation of fragments to the composition of a whole, but where it would become manifest as mobile encounters of divergent behaviours, and thereby help define its own space through relations of distance and proximity in a tense and ever-changing continuum. The endeavour was to discover a possible experience that might accommodate an absolutist ‘stack sculpture’ by Donald Judd just as well as gestures and conversations – or, more specifically, Louise Bourgeois’s Liars and the motocross bike that Jason Rhoades drove round inside the museum. Simultaneously. Articulating each other.

Since then we have built a somewhat more complex public awareness of what art was proposing in the course of that inspired, passionate twentieth century. Russian Constructivism has been liberated from the American reduction it underwent after the Second World War and the surrounding situation has been restored in its polemical complexity. Dadaism has acquired the classic status of a grand public discursive exhibition in Paris. Presentation practice has become a research field in itself. The elusiveness of Situationism has become a cult phenomenon. The big Anglo-Saxon museum machines have endeavoured to appropriate non-Western traditions, Post-colonialism has provided an intellectually substantiated diversification of views and the former Eastern Bloc, Yugoslavia and South America have re-evalued and marketed their radical post-war avant-gardes with all the intellectual capacity at their disposal. All this is partly because artists, more than ever before, have managed to let the complexity of art infiltrate a market that is becoming less monolithic. On their side there have been sympathetic intellectuals, who are thematising this complexity, and people in the curatorial niche that has emerged in the meantime, who are reformalising it. The market, taking guidance from this newly apparent complexity, has established countless new niches and sales opportunities.

II.

The Broadening of Art

The bourgeoisie likes contradiction, but in moderation. That art museums have remained museums of artworks for so long has much to do with the avant-garde artists and their uncontrollable passion for reigniting the art tradition. The opening up of the area for activity in visual art could be seen as three major movements: 1. The Early Avant-Garde Wanting to Take on the World

After a determined start at the end of the nineteenth century, the early avant-garde presses forward to create a new world. Visual art plays a key role; it is a platform for development and a reference for a new grammar and it seamlessly moves on into reflecting and shaping this new world. Artists at that time often stood with one foot in the traditionally formed patterns of art and the other foot in a much freer area – one pillar on land and one in the sea, like the Angel of the Apocalypse. Futurist manifestos shared a moment with flat paintings, ready-mades with studies of nudes. We might see this as a split, but it is probably more accurate to interpret it as an ambition to hold onto artistic tradition and to imbue it with life, in one broad stroke, to give it a new social meaning. Even the formal French schools stress this ambition to offer a new outlook for society. It is certainly present in Futurism and in Dadaism, which wanted to combine art and life in a Cabaret Voltaire; in early Abstraction; in de Stijl, where fine art, applied art and architecture perfectly slot into place; in Russian Constructivism, which wants to be part of a revolutionary society; in schools like Bauhaus and Vkhutemas that want to connect the new vision with industrial production processes. There, in all sorts of ways, structured or informal, clumsy or flawless, art wants to march out into the world. So the lure of the art museum is doomed in advance: its files become populated by an endless amount of monstrous hybrids that are still – completely, or partially, or perhaps

Approaching Art through Ensembles — Bart De Baere

That era of Americanism had extended art history to beyond the bourgeois period in which it was created. It had already appropriated the early avant-garde and stripped it of its intractability. It had reduced Malevich to painting and Rodchenko to sculpture. The early avant-garde was celebrated after the Second World War, but it was as if its body and soul had become separated. The body of the classical early avantgarde, its study of form, had delivered the material for building a bridge from older art to the post-war market system. This bridge made it possible to present the Surrealists without their mad spatiality; it reduced Schwitters to a collagist with an interesting background story and turned Duchamp into a producer of multiples. The art market, but also the museum system and public presentation tout court – they were all based on the work of art.

actually – art, but no longer artworks. Instead they are spaces, actions, propaganda designed by artists.

2. The Neo-Avant-Garde Cultivating the Art Space

The neo-avant-garde will have more limited ambitions from the late fifties onwards. They will try, in different ways, to create an autonomous space for art and thereby articulate a number of alternative possibilities to make art visible for the public. New categories of form are established as genres in their own right with their own distribution channels: performance, video, artists’ books, mail art… Socio-political engagement is one possibility – with Joseph Beuys’s commitment to the Green Party as the most visible expression – but no longer an inherent, integrated ambition for all art. Jimmie Durham becomes disappointed, despite the rapidly growing appreciation for his work when he makes art again in New York in the eighties, after his years of political activism. His works do not provoke serious discussion but are only seen as ‘representation of engagement’. Art strives to become a field of values unto itself, which in some segments enter into critical alliances with the market and elsewhere forms alternative networks, such as the Situationist International and fluxus. In some cases, like that of ‘visual poetry’ in Western Europe, it even remains outside the art world. Artists request and are granted a place as actors. Again they write manifestos or publish, with the people that surround them, their own magazines and books that in words, images, design and packaging become a radical foundation for what also

The European powers that negotiate with the market and play its game – from Beuys, Broodthaers or Polke to the Italian arte povera artists – play on the duality of object and mental social space, but their thoughts are still mainly disseminated through artworks. To the extent that other forms of expressions are collected, this until recently occurred in the archival half of the museum. Curiously, such things were not regarded as art. For many decades after the Second World War the hegemony of the once provincial New York market system is almost total, dominating not only the media but also the art education system. Yet this also allows havens for art to exist in the margins, in places where art detaches itself from the market through internationally networked alternative scenes, the ‘immer emigration’ of meditative artists or the political activism of others. Such contexts allow the spirit of the early avant-garde to stay alive. This has re-emerged in recent years with the renewed public esteem and increasing commercialisation of the Neo-AvantGarde, from French fluxus to Moscow Collective Actions, from the American outsider James Lee Byars to the Belgian outsider Jef Geys, from Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon to Helio Oiticica’s Parangolés. 3. Freedom as an Element of Commercialisation in Recent Decades

When the post-war structure of the world begins to fall apart in the eighties, the entire range of possibilities for artistic expression pass into collective ownership and artists must no longer work in niches but can create their own mix of broad exhibition platforms and marketing operations, with or without the initial efforts which lay behind these twentieth century traditions. The painting of the transavanguardia is an expression of this space that was suddenly open, but this is just as true of the new formatting of photography to match the scale

Approaching Art through Ensembles — Bart De Baere

Very much like the Pre-Modern artists of the fifteenth century, their Modernist counterparts also make work for specific spaces, contexts and small audiences. For other people, to be sure, for new clients: they can no longer count on the support of the nobility and the church but must create it themselves, since the days of Courbet with his Atélier and the Impressionists with their pastel-coloured Salon des indépendants. The Modernist artists want to take over the art scene and let art do the work. They construct their own spaces and connections, at first often working for small groups of sympathisers. As a collective, artists in fact become their own commissioners, and their task is to reinvent art so that they can become an engine for society. You can only ever be avant-garde if the masses want to follow in your footsteps.

is happening with their work. ‘The book, consisting of photographic statements and written testimonies, bases its critical and editorial assumptions upon the knowledge that criticism and iconography only give a limited view of and a partial feeling for how artists work […]’ is the fundamental attitude that Germano Celant formulates in his seminal text Arte povera from 1969.

and scope of painting, and of the countless hybrid forms that artists are using. 30

III.

These three movements of the twentieth century – taking on the world, creating a space for art, playing with a mix of possible expressions – correspond with three major areas in which we may now formulate a concept of art that leads on to ensembles. From this renewed focus of the present, we may approach the historical avant-garde differently and realise that the challenges that have become explicit today were actually on the agenda throughout the twentieth century. 1. The Nature of the Social Impact

Artists have been recasting the most divergent phenomena in the world as visuality – sex, their own bodies, the mass media, politics, the everyday, the landscape, urban incidents, language, music, architecture, rumours, and it goes on – long enough to create a collective awareness that everything can be art. That nothing can be excluded. Conversely, any action performed by an artist effectively, inevitably and continuously becomes part of an art proposal. The refusal by artists to cultivate their own public persona is as much a part of their practice as doing so; the non-appearance at your own opening is as much a part of the media mix as courting collectors. Artists today are doomed to define their own social impact themselves. While the early avant-garde saw society as its target (with art at heart) and the neo-avant-garde targeted art itself (thinking that this would eventually make society move), no such determined effort can be noticed today. The prevailing criteria for success in the commercial and media markets are not persuasive enough to become valid goals for artists. Focusing purely on them will always lead to a generic product. Such success no longer stands for difference, as before, but for variety marked by a fundamental lack of difference.

Approaching Art through Ensembles — Bart De Baere

This can be seen as a third stage. It took the art scene a hundred years to absorb the expansion of art into a wider range of activities and formal possibilities. Seen as positively as possible, it can be called an integrated space. The walls and sluice gates of the old system have been torn down. Anything is possible, but therefore perhaps also nothing. The market and event culture are flourishing. What remains most difficult is the value judgment that is really at stake here: one that is cultural rather than economic. This is not about convertibility and appropriation in the economic sense, but about non-convertibility and public domain. The limit – the nearly un-thinkable – is above all in the articulation of the intrinsic value of an artist’s proposal, that which can give art sustainable impact. The freedom of the artist has become more obvious today, and therefore also more problematic. This might be a stimulus for institutions to approach the recent past differently.

The Inevitability of Own Topographies, Trajectories and Finalities

What that difference might be is no longer quite clear. To understand this also becomes the task of the artist, who must now not only define his oeuvre and his space but also his production of meaning, his patterns of movement in the most fundamental way: he must determine his own route and the sense it is supposed to make. The arte povera hero Michelangelo Pistoletto invests his capital in a foundation at Biella in northern Italy that literally wants art to energise society, while the young Antwerp artist Vaast Colson opts for ephemeral gestures at the edge of visibility to enable art to continuously become one with society.

At the same time there is another context, more difficult to detect: the setting of insights within which artists make their proposals. Art must often – especially in the crucial initial phase – contribute to creating its own environment, the space where it can exist. So artists become symbolic stakeholders, from the very beginning, of the situation which brings forward their art and with which they will remain linked. If we consider this setting for art a constituent part of the intellectual context, Badovinac’s approach becomes really interesting. Then we can value the contribution of artists to how social and existential problems are approached at a given moment, and understand that the difference that they make stays relevant beyond that moment, just like the achievements of philosophy and theory. 2. A Space for Art

It has become customary for artists to at least intervene in those locations that the neo-avant-garde preferred to cultivate in their efforts to create their own space for art. Publications, invitation cards and other printed matter surrounding a public project, whether its is an exhibition or something else, are natural components of the framework, just like the

Artists are all but obliged to compose their own space for art. They do this by sketching out their own history through actions that accord them special status within the meshwork of traditions that constitute the art scene. The production of artworks as such, and the market that appropriates them, is sometimes just a miniscule part of the total of their activities. They build their own organisations for themselves, and later perhaps their own foundations. They choose their galleries and exhibition spaces not just for their technical qualities but also for the kind of value they embody as setting. Artists help decide the exhibition title and campaign image, which function as a summary of the project. The title and the basic image are inevitably just as much a part of the art as the works they announce, and not only in project such as the collaborative work realised at M HKA in 2011 by Lawrence Weiner and Liam Gillick, two artists who explicitly position themselves at this limit. Today it is in fact expected of artists that they shall manage the intellectual circumstances around their work. Also this they have already been doing for long, at least to some extent, and now it has become an everyday practice that is often also consciously formalised. Artists govern initial information and reflection on their work, commissioning writers and providing them with input. Such interventions do not amount to the gathering of laudatory speeches to serve as glorified sales pitches. It initiates points of views, modes of approaching the work… When an artist like Luc Tuymans masterminds the content of his catalogues and even controls access to his visual sources in detail, it is something he considers himself obliged to do. With excessive openness he seeks to disarm the anecdotal and content-orientated approach and make it a harmless, perhaps even liberating measure for conveying anything that concerns him, rather than allowing viewers to interpret the work at their own leisure. This kind of activities in no way turns artists into manipulative charlatans without belief in the intrinsic value of their own work, like the travelling tailors in The Emperor’s New Clothes. Artists undertake this because they are aware of images in a sophisticated way; they know that each small part of an image contributes to determining its reception.

Approaching Art through Ensembles — Bart De Baere

Slovenian museum director Zdenka Badovinac has advocated the study of the history of regional intellectual contexts alongside local art history, and rightly so, because they form a context that resonates with art proposals, enabling us to better understand how they come together and are brought forward. We can see the intellectual context in the classical sense, as the concrete social and metaphysical insights that feature in an artist’s surroundings, how they are justified or challenged and which thinkers create change and when and how.

picture frame and the colour of the wall already were for the Impressionists.

In an increasingly discursive world artists are also expected to be discursive, and they obviously wish to intervene in the discourse to benefit their art. They take the stage as speakers or become curators to mould the broader view of the art scene according to their perspective. Sometimes, as with Jimmie Durham, who is also an important essayist, discourse is a complement to the work; sometimes, as with Agency, which M HKA presented as part of the Textiles project, it is a core component. 3. Composing the Oeuvre

Artists communicate mainly with the totality of their actions. They know that individual elements will inevitably be incorporated into the whole, often literally the moment they appear in a solo exhibition, and in any case implicitly. Members of their initial and (for the artists) crucial audience – whether it be essayists, gallery owners, collectors, critics or other decision-makers – are always aware of artists’ broader activities and will assess them accordingly, perceiving and valuing the work against the background of previous knowledge. Much of today’s art even relies on this and is only easily accessible with such a context in place. Accidental spectators without prior knowledge must try to grasp an entire process through their experience of the moment, where the broader picture might not always be very apparent.

M HKA, just like many Flemish private collectors, possesses three paintings by Wilhelm Sasnal, in addition to a video work that he himself considers important and a long series of drawings. Each of these is a work unto itself and could have been sold as such, but at the Gwangju Biennale Sasnal showed them as a single coherent work with four interlaced storylines. The M HKA also has a comic book and a board game made by this artist. The passage inside traditions is a role that artists choose for themselves, a casting of themselves that becomes part of their proposal. It lends sharpness to a scene in which interdisciplinarity has become the standard. The same material can simultaneously lead to a giveaway publication for Agnès B and to costly photographs in low quantities for the market. Whereas multiples were long considered derivative material and the uniqueness of the work still remained an implicit basic condition, the basic condition is now the multiple, even in painting, where seriality has become commonplace. The edition is determined as much by practical circumstances – what works best in the market, how much time the maker wants to spend on something – as by the fact that it has become a decision in itself for artists. One still remains a valid option, because this number meets the viewer on an equal footing – that of uniqueness – but five is also almost one in our overpopulated world.

Approaching Art through Ensembles — Bart De Baere

Last but not least, the composition of the oeuvre is just as relevant as what the individual works express; they exist in this setting and are articulated by it. It is therefore important to view artists in the light of their entire production and understand how it has come about. Works are often created and presented in series. Paintings may aspire to their own pictorial finality, but they may also become vehicles for processes that wash over them, or else just a working medium like any other, with which any technically capable painter can work, like a photographer who makes a photograph for another artist or a carpenter who executes a sculpture. In his exhibition at Stella Lohaus Gallery in Antwerp in 2010 Bjarne Melgaard showed self-portraits that M HKA would have gladly acquired had it had the means. He is a gifted painter but he left the painting of the portraits to an assistant and then made adjustments to them; painting in itself is not what interests him.

Artists compose the diversity of their oeuvre and situate each element of it within a broader framework, of their own history as well as the history of their chosen medium. It is not only painting that has a broad tradition in which each choice carries weight; the numerous alternative media that have emerged also have it. Prints, artists’ books, videos, actions and their documentation, none of these exists in themselves but rather as phenomena in the field of media traditions where recognition continually reverberates. The decision to sign up for one of the many versions of the neo-avant-garde, which developed into genres, is motivated by convention, but inevitably also plays with it. Artists may now oscillate back and forth between media that previously seemed irreconcilable, between various manifestations that used to be seen as either avant-garde or reactionary. Sculptures morph into installations that invade space and are subsequently reformatted to become sculptures again. Performance artists may also make paintings; painters may produce videos.

IV.

A Respectful Relationship with Contemporary Art

In the last two decades it has finally become common for artists not only to receive a place but also to be able to make their own space in museums. Collecting practice still does not always know how to deal with this. The tendency is still to identify a collection with artworks. If collecting practice wants to retain the context of those artworks, then it expands into collecting installations and stiffening situations into monolithic, quasi-sculptural arrangements of diverse elements in a correct and fixed context. Yet at the same time artists use these same museums as an integral mobile space. Can collecting practice accommodate not only the form but also the spirit of artists’ interaction with museum space? Thinking in ensembles might be a beginning. Currently, an institution’s ready-made knowledge of the works in its collection is often limited to an A4 summary provided by its mediation service. This is accompanied by a similarly short text on the artist’s biography. Various members of staff keep overviews of roughly the same order in their heads. These are the people who ‘know the collection’. Encyclopaedic thinking is a long-lost ambition – in the meantime we have learned that surveys are not feasible, that they at best produce only a crude map – but the synthetic modus operandi of this mindset

Yet such insights do pass through the institution. When a work is purchased more information becomes available and it is possible to find proof of it in the archives. Perhaps a member of the museum’s staff is in contact with the artist at a moment when some problems occur or when an text is being prepared, and sharper insights may therefore remain in his or her personal backpack; perhaps an exhibition with the artist in question is being organised that more thoroughly reveals the consistency and setting of his or her work. For such things, however, institutions increasingly rely on external specialists: they let external writers write for publications put together by external publishers. Perhaps this seems more professional and efficient, but in practice it means that afterwards the institution itself may not even possess the final digital version of the text. Indeed, final corrections are made in the PDF that is filed with the publisher, graphic designer and printer. The communication with interested parties is not necessarily connected with institutional intelligence. The mediation system may sometimes be interactive and diversified, but it is also a professionally structured instrument that is self-reliant and, in addition, was often created by external partners. Since the seventies museums have kept themselves obsessively busy with completing surveys of their objects, a task they never seem to be able to complete. They have coupled this survey with an ever more perfectionist conservation and management apparatus. Additional information and insights can be appended to more sophisticated databases, but this is not the core task of the inventories. The central ambition could also be to gain an understanding of the artists for whom a museum is engaged – a purchase at least gives the impression of engagement – that is in-depth and based on their qualities. It would seem natural that this stimulates further engagement, but it does not always happen. Among its various assets – artists’ books, books edited or designed by artists, invitation cards, photographs for which

Approaching Art through Ensembles — Bart De Baere

When art claimed its independence from the avant-garde by breaking away from the social consensus it also made itself homeless, displaced. Art is no longer about something that is, but about something that might be. The nineteenth-century salon painters were promptly incorporated into the museums. With avant-garde art came a disconnection between the production of art and its societal acceptance, which we might call ‘museumisation’. For a long time the best cases were exceptions, from artist-driven early modern art museums such as MoMA in New York and Museum Sztuki in Lódz to that moment in the sixties when the museums’ dams were temporarily broken by now legendary exhibitions.

has lingered. The immediately available information of works in the collection is of the same nature as the information that fills the Internet or other mass media: good syntheses with accidental areas of depth, but without organic connection to more profound insights.

the museum may or may not hold the rights, fragments of stories – the museum could find possibilities for presenting an artist’s oeuvre more fully. The essence of ensemble thinking is that it addresses questions that are otherwise bubbling away at the perimeter of what can be managed and controlled. This is actually what good researchers would do anyway: asking themselves in which setting the object of the research is to be found and to what extent that setting is necessary for the research. Ensemble thinking is a form of mindfulness and self-criticism.

With this method, artworks are very likely to accrue a broader and more sustainable base of insights. It differs substantially from what is called ‘contextualisation’, which was a popular way of differentiation in the past through which as yet nonvalorised oeuvres were brought to attention, from the standpoint of how they achieved something in a particular situation. This is a relativistic attitude: something derives its meaning from its surroundings, not from its behaviour (which, of course, is informed through interaction with that environment and may also be more easily read from there). Ensemble thinking is precisely about finding a platform that is as precise as possible and helps focusing on the particularity of such individual behaviour. It asks whether an institution’s assets are optimal for the purpose of understanding artists and their work, and if the presentation and framing of these assets reflect their qualities in an optimal way. It seeks significance not only in individual assets but also in their

The ambition is certainly not to make a shift from the presentation of artworks to a documentary space, as often happens nowadays, or from a catalogue raisonné of artworks to an extended version where prints and multiples, invitation cards, public statements, exhibition titles and other such things are added. Yet ensemble thinking does question how and to what extent elements from that long list of possibilities come into play, and how much weight they carry. Sometimes the resulting image is panoramic; sometimes it is just the conscious renunciation of important options, a strict refusal, an understatement that articulates a relaxed way of dealing with things. We can be sure that where an artistic practice itself searched for concentrated forms or syntheses, these will be prioritised anew after all the meandering. Such a reflective glance, which constantly searches for both focus and frame, will turn artists into respected actors. Their actions continue to set the tone, even if questions and discussions about that tone will continue. The task is to always find new connections with artists’ activities, a complexity that remains uncertain but that can never be replaced by the most eloquent opinion of the day.

Approaching Art through Ensembles — Bart De Baere

It really should be standard procedure to ask questions about how artists give stature to their oeuvre, how they articulate their own space with the many resources available today or how they aspire to making a social impact and perhaps also consciously enact this beyond what is traditionally seen as their work. The possibility of developing a collection with the kind of images that give tentative answers to those questions will only tighten the focus on the artwork that might have been the point of departure – unless that work was really not a work but a documentation of something else; then the focus will consciously shift away from the mutilated piano by Ben Vautier or Wolf Vostell, which then ceases to be a work of art and becomes the documentation of a fluxus concert.

consistent internal interaction and their ‘outward’ consistency. This is the opposite of contextualising. It is about the potential ‘outward’ effects that are embedded in artistic practice and therefore might influence future appearances of a given work.

Responsible ImageMaking: The Art Hypothesis

Ensemble thinking in the contemporary art museum relies on engagement and effectively takes the consequences of this. It concretises engagement into ‘items’ or points of appearance that it finds important. These will often be artworks, but can also be (artists’) texts or tools, photographs or moments. It aspires to discover meaningful relationships between the points of appearance of something in which it is itself engaged. It aspires to add ‘assets’ to each of these points of appearance. These contain formatted possibilities for insight. Sometimes they appear to be informative – what an artist says about an item, in which specific circumstances it appeared for the first time – and sometimes essayistic, for instance describing which insights were formulated by the institution where the item was presented. Every time an engagement is resumed we search for new insights from the new moment, but at the same time we gather more insights as possible alternative approaches. These are also continuously offered to anyone who wishes to enter into

This has been about inter-subjectivity from the beginning. Institutional engagements must always be sustained by more than one person. It is assumed that this institutional support for ensemble thinking may be extended to many more people far beyond the first setting, those who are called the ‘public’, ‘audience’ or ‘stakeholders’, and thereby to society as a whole. A public cultural institution produces proposals that only make sense if people in the community make them theirs, consider them in their own way, and are involved in them for their own purposes. And, moreover, if the institution presents itself as accountable to them and is open to changing its proposals. It can achieve this through expressing as specifically as possible why and how it once entered into an engagement and how it perceives it at the given moment. This also makes the institution approachable; it is interested in related items and assets that may be added to existing items. It can welcome these and give them a place. Intersubjectivity is the goal. The institution will therefore ask of researchers working inside or outside it to not only submit results – a text by a writer, an exhibition by a guest curator – but as far as possible also share the more meaningful aspects of the research, so that to begin with the museum itself can be involved, with the people who work there and are in charge of the project, and then society at large. This can create an ecology. Now the same basic information often has to be brought together time and again. With a new system members of staff can share more of their internalised knowledge with their peers, and external researchers can leave behind more of the content in their backpack for the institution that engages them. Also literally, because as authors they can avail themselves of all that material at a later date without having to archive it themselves in ever new electronic formats, and they will be recognised and respected as authors, if even their research, through a creative commons license to which the institution aspires, is in the public domain for non-commercial purposes.

Approaching Art through Ensembles — Bart De Baere

The institutional application of ensemble thinking implies that databases that are rather different from the typical cataloguing software for museums and libraries will become central to the organisation. It might seem as if this approach to art, if realised by the institution, will be just another version of extensive archiving. This is not so. In a certain sense it is even an anti-archival approach. Indeed it does not want to look objectively at everything. It wants to immediately sustain what appears to be especially urgent, necessary and meaningful. It is pro-active and based on choices. It relies on subjectivity and cultivates it not as arbitrariness but on the contrary, as an alternative to the actual arbitrariness and loss of meaning in objectifying methods. It is thus a possible answer to the deficits of encyclopaedic collecting practice, which it considers unnecessary (in a time of pervasive visibility), impossible (in a time of over-capitalisation) and meaningless (because it now seems wrong as a project).

an engagement, becomes interested in an item and wants to further think about it. Ultimately this is not about ‘content management’ – the managing of a ‘content’ that is seen as a fact – but about the continual revival of a quest for insights, and about a methodology and discipline through which bridges can be sustained for this purpose.

This leads to an art hypothesis. The institution makes proposals, time and again. Its collection is fuelled by these proposals and by the response to them. Its collection is essentially the connections between these proposals, which gives meaning to its elements, situating them within a broad yet concrete image of what art can be; it consists of insights but also of experience. We may perhaps compare the art hypothesis, as an alternative to encyclopaedic thinking, with how a landscape painter paints a landscape. He does not bring all the trees of the forest together, but tries to achieve enough ‘forest-ness’ to infuse the image with enough ‘bushiness’. To this purpose he focuses on specific trees in a specific landscape, and still it is for him about the landscape as a whole, the world in which we live. In contrast to museums in the past, which told a master narrative that proffered itself as being definitive and comprehensive, the art hypothesis of the contemporary institution – more or less conscious and articulated – will always be temporary, because it is only sustainable in its variable continuations, and it will always be partial. The art hypothesis consists of choices that open the horizon onto a broader whole, but are anchored in the here-and-now and depart from the focus of past and present engagements. Through these, a consistency is created from which we can think ahead. The big structural change is refocusing from an ownershiporientated view of things (that our items must be catalogued)

to a commitment to public domain (to how we can fulfil our public function effectively). The museum is thus no longer a place that has to have, or should have to have, a representative amount of what is ‘most important’ (and thereby will fail ever more tragicomically in this world of ever more multiplying and economising); it is a space that strives toward a respect for intensities and the complexity associated with them. For its ensembles, this space will search for anchor points in materiality, but it may also envisage memories or references as items. The ensembles may be a phantom body, of which first a pinkie, then an elbow touches the beholder, a fragment that as pars pro toto hints at the whole. In this way, the institution becomes a potential partner for all the other actors, possibly also for those that deal with property rights, and certainly for the authors, who often benefit from the further insights and memories developed around their items. It is possible for the museum to do this without conflicts of interest; it respects holders of rights and simply looks at where and how its engagements can become part of the public domain. It views its own insights, and those of others who continue to contribute, as much as possible from a Creative Commons perspective, whereby non-commercial use is automatically allowed, provided that proper reference is made. The institution can also stay much truer to what it can actually handle in its collection, to the presentation of an artistic proposal in its complexity. The possibility of social embedding crucially depends on the insights that can surround items. The institution stands behind UNESCO’s thinking regarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. For things, too, it is about the experience and further continuation of the engagement; this is not only true for heritage phenomena such as processions or carillon playing. The basis of the museum’s engagement is then the characteristics of people and societies that cannot be privatised, of insights and memories. That is what the museum focuses on. While the Internet offers an opportunity for interest to grow bottom–bottom, without any more talk of the ‘up’, of a system that should put a value on this interest and put it to work, the museum provides for the sustainability of such ‘bottom’ ratings. It does so through the magnetic attraction of its engagements, but as a listener rather than as a speaker.

Approaching Art through Ensembles — Bart De Baere

To be able to achieve this the institution must first realise the consequences of its new attitude and not only list what it presents but also motivate why and tell what it has understood in the process. It can only fully live up to this if its actions and thinking merge and if it also tries to formulate the intensity that arises from this double move. Ensembles aspire to be faithful to art projects, but at the same time realise that they are only a continuous attempt at approaching them. They have no ambition to settle into one definitive story. On the contrary, they provide the cross-link for diverse engagements at diverse moments. It is out of this diversity that an evaluation grows. Ensembles are not just aimed at singular art projects but will equally find connections between them, because their meaning is also, and perhaps especially, in such connections.

It seeks engagements that demand to be tested against the insights that it receives and wants to capture these insights and keep them in circulation to fuel further engagements. It wants to preserve insights and be included in significant relationships. It can only do this by departing from restrictions, however hypothetical and therefore changeable. These are positive constraints, engagements that it finds it must assume; it bases itself upon the same sort of intensities as those to who it gives attention.

This essay was written for L’Internationale, published by JRP | Ringier in their ‘Documents’ series, 2012.

Approaching Art through Ensembles — Bart De Baere

The museum is by no means the only actor in this. In an art world where more and more collaborations take place or are even being outsourced – research, curatorship, production and image-making – it is less of an actor than ever, and the commitment translates into attention for what is happening and into respect for what other parties do and understand. It is editor and subeditor, and knows itself to be a service provider, not a content supplier.

Honore d’O, All the details extended en fractures récomposées, 1995-2000. ©image: Syb’l. S Pictures

To Think What We Are Doing Dieter Roelstraete The immediate source of the work of art is the human capacity for thought, as man’s “propensity to truck and barter” is the source of exchange objects, and as his ability to use is the source of use things. — Hannah Arendt 1 From 2003, when I first started working at the museum of contemporary art, till the beginning of 2012, the moment of my departure for a new museum, city, country, continent, I was fortunate enough to be a privileged participant in many an eye-opening curatorial experience. I was directly involved, either as a curator or co-curator, organizer or researcher, author or facilitator, in close to 20 exhibitions and exhibition projects of varying size, scale, and complexity, all of which can now be seen, in retrospect, to have added up to an invaluable cumulative learning experience. A major part of that experience was rooted in a learning process that I have 1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 168. The title of the present essay is likewise taken from (the introduction to) Arendt’s The Human Condition: “What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and

our most recent fears. This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness (…) seems to be among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. “What we are doing” is indeed the central theme of this book.” Ibid., p. 5.

hearing how much time artists like Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner – and in this, crucially, they are of course no different from many, if not most other artists – were prepared or even happy to spend discussing titles, typographies and technical trifles of all kinds, almost to the point where what I perceived to be the actual work of art threatened to be eclipsed by the discussion of what, to me at least, appeared to merely ‘happen’ or take place around the work of art, is precisely what lead me to reconsider the balance between the work of art and its ‘surroundings’ more forcefully than any other curatorial venture had managed to do thus far. A Syntax of Dependency:, in short, did or does not merely consist of a gigantic linoleum floor piece made up of an abstract color pattern containing a handful of gnomic inscriptions in three languages (an object that no longer exists anyway); it is not merely a thing with other, lesser things that either predate it, come after it or are scattered around it – the work’s true wealth and significance, in my opinion, lies in the project’s spectacular expansiveness, the breadth of its orbit, the singular force with which its experience (here: the experience of having worked on its coming-into-being) has broadened the scope and horizon of artistic production, of art-work. It does not merely ‘include’, but properly consists of, is made of all that which we habitually tend to consider as the artwork’s surroundings – the long conversations that predate it, the earliest sketches that hint at its imminence, the images that promote it, the title that announces it, the photographs that are made, by the visitors, of its use and its mere beingthere, the publication that is printed long after the work itself is gone, the single slab of linoleum now standing, spectral and trace-like, against a wall in the curator’s deserted office… All this taken together is what makes up Gillick and Weiner’s A Syntax of Dependency:. A Syntax of Dependency: is all of this ‘ensemble’. In 2007, on the occasion of the museum’s twentieth anniversary, M HKA published a catalogue of its collection titled Jubilee. An English translation of that catalogue has yet to appear, but the book’s double preface, written by M HKA director Bart De Baere in collaboration with the undersigned, contains a couple of passages worth previewing; they are all more or less related to both the idea of the ‘ensemble’ (though it was only in passing couched in those exact terms)

To Think What We Are Doing — Dieter Roelstraete

gotten used to referring to – along with my colleague Bart De Baere – as ‘thinking-in-action’, a formula we’ll be returning to shortly. One central dynamic motif that has structured much of this process could be characterized in the following complimentary terms: those of the ever-deepening complexity of the concept (or idea) of art on the one hand, and its everwidening reach on the other hand. Not only has my conception of art deepened over the years – a deepening that has revealed an unsuspected wealth, precisely, of complexity – but it has also widened, its horizon expanded: I now think of many more things as ‘art’, that is to say as integral to the idea of art, than I used to. In this sense, no curatorial experience has perhaps been more instructive and enlightening than the exhibition project A Syntax of Dependency:, a collaborative work by Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner that was realized at M HKA in the spring of 2011. What, exactly, was so illuminating about this particular project? Many things were, but (for starters) let me single out a handful of elements in particular: the emphasis put by both artists on the fact that the exhibition title should include, at its end, a colon; the long-drawn-out process of arriving at the right exhibition invite and annunciatory press image, both of which appeared to have relatively little to do, in retrospect, with the artwork as it finally manifested itself in the museum; the protracted tussle over the title as such (a syntax, no semantic; dependency, not influence). Though none of these elements figured very prominently in the process’ final result, that is to say (in what could be called), the actual work of art – a gigantic linoleum floor piece made up of an abstract color pattern that contained a handful of gnomic inscriptions in three languages – there was a sense in which working on this specific exhibition, and pondering the aforementioned details more concretely, decisively and definitively raised my awareness of the depth, flexibility and breadth of the concept of art in the context of a collaborative, intensely debated and negotiation-heavy project such as this, and I’ve been thinking ever since how great it would be to figure out a way to include Liam and Lawrence’s discussion of, say, certain orthographic minutiae or particular advertising design decisions in the final presentation of the piece – for these seemingly minute matters clearly were as much a part of the project’s core concerns (i.e. of the project’s very concept of art) as the f/actual execution of its basic formal idea. Indeed, seeing or

and that of ‘thinking-in-action’ – with the notion of the ensemble resembling, or enacting, one particular mode of such thinking-in-action, such activating thought precisely. A scattered helping, a smattering of quotes:

The notion of the ‘ensemble’ as something that is thought, or imagined, together, is crucial to this particular working hypothesis – as is the notion of work in the idea of hypothesis as such. This hypothetical, speculative thinking-together has a quintessentially connective dimension, and its connectivity, the continuous experimental development of networks of new (and old) connections, is constitutive of the ensemble’s ‘thinking-in-action’. [This experimental process of reticular assembly has an almost artisanal dimension to it; the ensemble truly is an assemblage, something which we imagine to involve a sort of imaginative, associative tinkering: blending, gluing, welding or tying together – with an eye, of course, on this togetherness’ overall aesthetic effect.2] To return to the aforementioned preface:

A little further on, the ceaseless call for rethinking and reinventing the collection along the lines of such activating thought processes – a perfectly logical consequence of the very unpredictability, instability and complexity of the concept of art in and of itself (and in the contemporary) – is linked to the epochal shift, in much recent art discourse, from object to project, and to the gradual replacement of the artwork’s object status – formerly the holy grail of art ‘production’ – by the much more flexible, active notion of its performativity. (Returning to Hannah Arendt and The Human Condition, whose specter half-haunts the present argument, we could discern an echo of this shift in her differentiation

2. The notion of assemblage is clearly chosen here for its Deleuzian overtones. The ensemble, as a figure of both thinking and thought, resembles an assemblage as defined by Deleuze and Guattari in, their landmark A Thousand Plateaus: “simultaneously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an assem-

blage of enunciation” – or, as Jonathan Crary put in his Techniques of the Observer: “a site at which a discursive formation intersects with material practices.” The ensemble, in short, is a machine – and treated as such in its implementation as a collecting tool.

To Think What We Are Doing — Dieter Roelstraete

By their very nature, the many different ‘things’ (documents, facts, ideas, images, objects) that conventionally, habitually and traditionally constitute art and/or museum collections, do not really belong together. That is to say, they come from very different periods and places, from here and there and then and now, and were conceived, designed and/or made by very different people (not all of them artists, moreover), unaware of their future fate in a contingent commonality – that of such a collection precisely. And a collection only truly becomes a collection when these irreducible heterogeneities can be thought together [a French writer would have said: pensées ensemble, DR] and imagined as a meaningful whole under the auspices of an idea of art. It is precisely this idea, one that cannot possibly be condensed in a single phrase, that allows for the collection to become the place in which an image of itself as the embodiment of such an idea of art can be produced. This idea is both given, in a passive sense, and actively takes shape in a permanent process of thoughtful activation. (…) ‘Collective’ presentations of artworks from the museum’s many different collections (a museum is always also a collection of collections) help us to progressively flesh out this idea, which can never be fully and conclusively articulated – it must always remain speculative and hypothetical: it must remain a hypothesis of art.

The hypothetical conception of art that is at the center of the current catalogue is obviously dynamic, incomplete, unstable and subject to flux (we would like to think that this is one of the reasons why the Fluxus philosophy of art has exerted such a formative influence on the collection’s genesis); it resembles a fabric of connective thought that is transformed over time, with illuminating new connections certain to emerge as newly acquired artworks move in and museum personnel changes. (…) Hence the focal emphasis on the museum as a “collection of thoughts, memories, insights, ideas”: they are the connective tissue that transforms the rambling clutter of art’s things – in short, artworks – into the well-tempered whole of a museum collection.

between work and action.3) Rather than a mere devaluation of discrete objects, however, this process entails an actual validation of the complexity that results from these objects’ myriad interactions within the broader framework or ‘totality’ of an artist’s practice (indeed, the shift from object to project or from product to process could also be rephrased as a shift from art work to art practice), i.e. a valuation of a continually growing number of objects – not all of which are material of course:

3. Let us briefly rehearse the basic argument underlying Arendt’s distinction: “Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body (…). The human condition of labor is life itself. Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence (…). Work provides an “artificial” world of things. (…) The human condition of work is worldliness. Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth

and inhabit the world. (…) This plurality is specifically the condition of all political life.” H. Arendt, op. cit., p. 7. For Arendt, art occupies a position of privileged hybridity between all three spheres, negotiating the best of both worlds; the artist, for instance, is named “the only ‘worker’ left in a laboring society” (p. 127), and art is singled out as that which lends durability to the world – that which makes it into a “reliable home for men” (p. 167). Works of art, finally, are “thought things”: thought (not cognition: like art, thought “has neither an end nor an aim outside itself”) is the

source of all art, and in its negotiating, transformative capacity art symbolically readies the world to become “a place fit for action and speech, for activities not only entirely useless for the necessities of life but of an entirely different nature from the manifold activities of fabrication by which the world itself and all things in it are produced” (p. 174). This readying, in short, is the essence of art’s very own activating thought, its thinking-in-action: art exists because (or when) thinking and doing are (or become) one.

Was it Hegel or Lenin who once asserted that “everything is connected”? [I remember someone saying this sometime.] A Hegelian Lenin, a Leninist Hegel? Or was it, rather, the Buddha himself – or someone of that ilk? That everything is connected is more easily said than thought, especially in the context of an art world whose own logic remains predicated primarily on an economy of singular things, not thoughts, rooted in a regime of lonely objects, not concepts. Moreover, as the vanguard of the dominant postmodern culture of fragmentation – yes, we are still in it, we will be forever in it – and as a bastion of the equally dominant culture of suspicion of everything that transcends the self and/or ‘mine’, the art world is forever inclined to resist totalizing thought. Thinking things together – establishing the pure immanence of thought – and thinking together as such, following or according to a syntax of dependency so to speak, are easily demonized in the art world’s arch-individualistic body politic. And the separation of doing and thinking, things and thoughts, is integral to this cultural complex. Indeed, it may sometimes seem as if everything is connected; in reality, however – and this much the institutional memory of a project such as A Syntax of Dependency: makes clear – everything must be connected still.

To Think What We Are Doing — Dieter Roelstraete

We want to envision artistic practice as a complex milieu in which art is not merely rendered present and/or made visible in works of art or art objects, but exists primarily (and residually) as the manifestation of an underlying texture of thoughts and insights, of acts, activities, and actions. [More Arendt-speak still, DR.] One self-evident consequence of this expansive operation is that archive, library and collection are considered categorically equivalent – and are interconnected as such. This equation has been made manifest in the digitalization of the museum’s various pools of information, enabling us to forge new relationships between existing bodies of knowledge, and to upgrade this newly forged network of relationships – a new type of knowledge of art – to the core of the museum’s daily dealings with art.

‘Ensembles’, as “complicated amalgams of different works that reflect the dynamic, unstable nature of an artist’s multifaceted practice”, constitute the most sophisticated objects of such a new type of knowledge of art – a new epistemology whose basic connective procedure must be perfectly attuned to the constant translation of thoughts into actions and actions into ‘works’ and back again: the founding logic of all practice, both artistic, critical and curatorial.

Liam Gillick & Lawrence Wiener ‘A Syntax of Dependency:’, M HKA, 04/02/2011 - 22/05/2011. ©image: Bram Goots

E n s e m b l e s Statements

Zip, Zap, Save & Safeguard: bien étonnés de se trouver… Marc Jacobs We go swimming, make associations, in search for fleeting meanings in a continuously flowing reality. It’s not about the romantic-modern ideal in which we tried to fathom the world in its deepest essence, but about the access to knowledge for temporary use. What roles can digital documentation processes play in innovating and facilitating the actors’ function in the field of Arts and (Cultural) Heritage, now that a few of the late-20th century’s revolutions seem to have become mainstream? With that I’m thinking of the multimedia, image and networking revolutions that together are associated as much with the breakthrough of the World Wide Web, as with the revolution of historicity regimes from 1989. The regime of historicity refers to the relationship between past, present and future. Very briefly: according to François Hartog, in that relationship the convincing example, the driving force or centre of gravity before 1789 lay in the (golden) past, in the subsequent period (1789-1989) full of isms in the future, and, since 1989, in the present. That would, according to this theory, be translated into the breakthrough of the 21st century’s ‘cultural heritage’ discourses and practices 1, amongst other 1. Arnoud Odding, Het disruptieve museum, Den Haag, O dubbel d, 2011, p.112

things. Association and direct mobilising ability, (for) here and now, is one of the simular characteristics of hyperlinks (which can, as time progresses, be activated by more and more people and can link to more and more virtual sites) that have a huge impact since the 1990s.

2. Steve Dietz, Zapping the Archives: Hypermedia and Anna Oppermann’s “Embraces” Ensemble, in: Archives and Museum Informatics, 12, 1998, pp. 101–106, p. 102

Meanwhile, since 2003, a small, unfinished revolution takes place in what at first sight seems to be the farthest thing away from (zipping and zapping with) contemporary art, namely in regard to so-called ‘living cultural heritage’: group culture borne/transferred via bodies. Previously, those forms of popular culture were subjected to ‘old SOS musealisation programmes’ (‘save’, document it, because it’s the eleventh hour). Currently, ‘safeguarding’ aims to be the key, along with a new-fangled description: ‘intangible cultural heritage’. In Article 2 of the 2003 UNESCO Convention, ‘safeguard’ is awkwardly described as “measures aimed at ensuring the viability of the intangible cultural heritage, including the identification, documentation, research, preservation, protection, promotion, enhancement, transmission, particularly through 3. Harald Kraemer, ‘Art is Redeemed, Mystery is Gone: The Documentation of Contemporary Art’, in: Fiona Cameron & Sarah Kenderdine, Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage. A Critical Discourse, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, The MIT Press, 2007, pp. 193-222

Zip, Zap, Save & Safeguard: bien étonnés de se trouver... — Marc Jacobs

In this short contribution, I point to two front-zones from the world of Arts and Heritage where attempts were and are made to handle these developments, from the perspective of documentation that goes beyond just storing, archiving, accumulating and being able to quickly retrieve. The zip format is an exponent of the latter processes: whereby series can be compressed and shoved together in a box, so that later they can be taken back out as a unit. In the 1990s, Cologne was one of the places where experiments were conducted at the borderline between science, contemporary art and museum practice. Work could thus continue on the recalcitrant key oeuvre of the artist Anna Oppermann (1940-1993). She created multilayer installations with text (fragments), image (fragments) and artifacts. She used analogue media to create associative webs, that she already called Ensembles. Interestingly, Anna attempted to create virtual networks, each trying to locate clues in material culture and ultimately operating in and around (art) museums. She experimented with ‘associationtriggering objects’, including the Embraces Ensemble (19771990). Her oeuvre was assimilated in the 1990s when the World Wide Web grew like wildfire. Sample the enthusiasm and the context in this quote: “For anyone who has enjoyed immersion in the pre-archived state of an un-catalogued cache of source materials, or spent much time clicking on blue, underlined words on the World Wide Web, this rich mix of a sense of spying on inner or behind-the-scenes processes, sleuthing connections, and having to construct an excuse for how you ended up where you started is instantly recognisable and utterly irresistible. It is what Martin Warnke has described as ‘joyful zapping’.” 2 That ‘zap’ metaphor (remote control and the

availability of multiple TV channels simultaneously) did not make it as an expression, nor did channel-swimming, but on the surface, ‘surfing’ did. Cologne academics opted for a serious name by pushing and facilitating the zip and zap combination: the ‘Hypermedia Picture-Text Archive’. Harald Kraemer tried to think this through. He pointed out that a museum evolves and expands from a ‘content pool’ (swimmer: swim!) via a ‘content provider’ to an ‘information broker’. This creates new challenges for IT systems and applications, for forms of interactivity and ‘external’ museum operation, but also for disciplines like art history and museology or for the strategic rethinking of documentation via digital and multimedia applications: “Documentation has to become a category and a strategy, which must be used in an active way by the researcher, curator, registrar, but also by the artist, and user (…) These will have consequences for the questions asked by later generations of researchers and, due to the increasing presence of digital media appliances in museums, will also change the viewing habits of visitors to the museums.” 3

The attempt to capture ‘performances’ is one of the overlapping challenges on the two recently indicated fronts in Arts and Heritage. Here we come across a researcher who has published research relevant to both: Diana Taylor and her reflections on The Archive and the Repertoire. She underlines the ability of both to apprehend, (re)produce, communicate and transfer knowledge across the generations. She situates the difference in the fact that in the case of the latter, it must be transferred (via the repertoire) by living bodies: ‘embodied’. It becomes very interesting and complex if we combine this with the insights of Taylor’s colleague at the Tish School in New York, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, so that heritage can be approached as a meta-cultural form of production, distribution and consumption. In the case of the paradigm of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, the combinations of ‘the archive’ and ‘the repertoire’ and brokerage or mediation (and in rich countries, digital facilitation) become part of the process itself. And this then leads us back to questions about how to distinguish ensembles from repertoires or from the (unfinished) ‘work’. Several research schools, ranging from Kirshenblatt-Gimblett to Howard Becker, thoroughly struggle with the question of what discourses on The Work Itself imply.

People seem to need conventions in order to deal with this; pragmatically. This presents major challenges, especially for classical disciplines like art history or history, certainly if one tries to work with useful rules of thumb like ‘situate it in context’. It increasingly appears to be a choice to research the developments, functions and resources at the time of creation or in the subsequent phases, and to bring them into view, while (or notwithstanding the fact that) the contemporary meaning, the present meta-production, distribution and consumption - thus ‘relevance (to the here and now)’ - is the privileged central line in the current dominant regime of historicity. This is now very acute in the work surrounding intangible cultural heritage, whereby tracing the ‘cultural heritage communities’ (in policy jargon for committed networks), is identified as a crucial problem. Is this not also a challenge that can be explored by museums of contemporary art, as when combining archive operations, virtual applications and brokerage and letting them evolve. If the combination of Arts and (tangible and intangible cultural) Heritage can now be rendered innovative anywhere, then in my opinion it is in the complex but fascinating issue presented in the opening sentence of this essay. The sensitizing power of the word ‘ensemble’ is great because it not only stands for ‘together’ but, in Latin etymology, means in simul, ‘at the same time’ (as in simultaneous), time and again.

Zip, Zap, Save & Safeguard: bien étonnés de se trouver... — Marc Jacobs

formal and non-formal education, as well as the revitalization of the various aspects of such heritage.” The huge incentive, spanner and sting in that convention is Article 15, where conditions are called for in those operations (including documentation): “to ensure the widest possible participation of communities, groups, and where appropriate, individuals that create, maintain and transmit such heritage, and to involve them actively in its management.” Currently, throughout the world, the best endeavours are being made to carry this out or think about what it might mean or imply. To address this, those in the heritage-world attempt to work with networks of organisations, groups and individuals valuing certain phenomena, active networks called ‘heritage communities’. One of the main contributions from Flanders to this movement is certainly an understanding that cultural brokerage, (through a local heritage cell for example) is a crucial, albeit too seldom mentioned critical success (f)actor, besides the Flemish ambition to share expertise and experience via an ICT platform. A wave of critical academic studies is in progress, but new theories of practice and model practices are especially needed.

The Long and Winding Road…

Tom Evens

To be absolutely clear, this is not a plea against copyright. Copyright protection is an essential condition for the creation and production of creative works. Copyright gives the creators of an original work the guarantee of economic valuation if a third party wants to pick up on this work. Without a ‘fee for the use of copyrighted material’, the creation and production of creative works is in jeopardy and any process of creativity and originality ceases. Indeed, not a single artist will still wish to invest in the creation of a work if there is no financial compensation linked to the further exploitation of the work. In other words, copyright law provides a guarantee on future innovation.

The Long and Winding Road... — Tom Evens

The Internet as a metaphor for an unlimited reservoir of books, audiovisual productions, photographic reproductions and other creative works. A network that in one click makes all knowledge, information and culture freely accessible across the whole world. At least that is the widespread perception that many people live, and probably the ultimate dream of many in the field. In practice, a significant part of our cultural heritage always remains excluded from this gigantic display. Museums and other arts and heritage institutions are confronted daily with practical objections to bringing the items in their collections into the digital world and providing users with wider access. These restrictions may be financial or organisational in nature, but all too often, copyright poses an obstacle to developing a digital strategy. If works are copyrighted, the formal consent of the owner is required. And that’s just the stumbling block...

However, the relationship between copyright, creativity and innovation is far from unambiguous. Copyright always gives the creator of a work a years-long monopoly on the future distribution and processing of the work. An excessively stringent application of copyright law sometimes does our information society more harm than good. Indeed, society takes advantage of the free circulation of knowledge and information while an overly strong emphasis on the interests of the author hampers any intention for innovation. The legislator has already granted an exception for the use of creative works within school walls, and could expand this to include the cultural and heritage sector. Thus, the current legislation does not allow archival institutions to make digital copies purely for preservation or protection purposes.

So this is not a plea against copyright, far from it, rather a plea for a greater balance between the rights of the author and those of the user. A plea for copyright protection and, at the same time, for innovation for and by the user. While the Internet plays a vital role in our consumption of information and our cultural experiences, we ascertain that this precarious balance between both interests is often disturbed. Finding this new balance is anything but obvious, but proves necessary in the evolution from a hermetically sealed model to a public cultural space where everything is connected with

The rise of ‘open content licenses’, with Creative Commons as the exponent, translates this need into a like balance between economic and more social interests. The as-perceived restrictive enforcement of copyright in today’s digital environment and the free dissemination of creative work, form a common thread through these licenses. This movement aims at the dissemination of creative works under ‘copyleft’ (as opposed to copyright). Creative Commons advocates protection of the author and creator, but wants to simultaneously limit that protection, allowing future producers to freely reproduce or even edit these works. It is thus important that the maker of the original work is protected, and that opportunities are created for further innovation and dissemination of that work. The author chooses the conditions under which the original work can be distributed or edited. In this sense, the focus shifts from ‘all rights reserved’, where the author retains full control over the dissemination and exploitation of the work, to ‘some rights reserved’, where the author decides to what extent the work is made available in the public domain. The progressive use of Creative Commons relaxes the (re)use of copyrighted works. These licenses are specially designed to support the owner(s) - because the initiative clearly lies with the original creative author - regarding access and dissemination of original works over the Internet. Due to the extensive use of Creative Commons licenses, a chain effect is created whereby the ‘free’ works circulate on the Internet and the mass distribution of these works is stimulated. With the help of this viral network effect, the public domain gradually and contractually expands. Thus, cultural heritage can also find its way to the public via the Internet, and art institutions can formulate a full digital strategy. The relevance of these models for organisations having a mediating role in the digital space cannot be underestimated. Creative Commons does not offer a solution to all the challenges, but it’s a useful step towards an open, digital collec-

The Long and Winding Road... — Tom Evens

In the past, arts organisations were not used to deal with copyright. In a network society, where the role of the Internet is difficult to overestimate, the situation is a bit different. The ability to enter into networks with other institutions and collections leads to a large public space in which cultural institutions mingle and are interconnected. Mutual relationships between author, producer, distributor and consumer have also changed dramatically through the advance of digital technology. Users are actively involved in the creation process, and via virtual communities the dissemination and sharing of content proceeds more quickly. Inasmuch as the number of copyright-related operations, such as making content public, downloading, and copying increase proportionally, cultural institutions will often come into contact with copyright law. The current copyright system is not optimised for the Internet age and offers little flexibility for digital collection management and experience. However, the author has all the benefit of an increased visibility of his/her work.

everyone. This plea for a proper balance is highly topical, especially as legislation is aimed at systematically extending the protection period. Recently, the terms of protection of original works increased from 50 to 70 years after the death of the author. This means that, on average - taking into account the increasing lifespan - a work lands in the public domain 104 years later...

tion policy. Since the initiative remains with the original author, it remains necessary to convince this side of the benefits of these licenses. Authors have a vested interest in fanning out their works to reach the widest possible audience. Moreover, Creative Commons does not prevent commercial exploitation. But all too often the crucial factor is still the collective management companies, who are not particularly inclined to such a form of individual rights, and would discourage their members from handling alternative licensing models. A Belgian pilot project, as per the ones recently launched by the Dutch organisation Buma/Stemra and the French collecting society SACEM, would be more than welcome to give Creative Commons a strong nudge in the right direction...

The Long and Winding Road... â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Tom Evens

Toward Process Management of a Public Space Miek De Kepper, Maja Coltura and David Vande Cauter This text is the result of a conversation. Bart De Baere, director of the M HKA, sat at table with Miek De Kepper, Maja Coltura and David Vande Cauter of LOCUS, Flemish Interface for local cultural policy, that assists libraries, cultural- and community centres. From Bildung of the individual...

If you speak with committed local culture professionals, the idea of Bildung still crops up. The Flemish translation of Bildung was at first something like ‘public advancement’. Then we spoke of the less patronising ‘public development’. This concept is rooted in a belief in the cultural growth process of each individual. Today, the culture professional translates public development objectives in the following way. He makes a selection from his background and his concern for high quality products. He eventually pushes a book, a stage show, ... a work of art that, according to his frame of reference, is worthwhile. Participating in this art happening delivers something to the visitor/reader. On the sure condition that participation is about more than just consuming: the experience of a work of art requires the commitment and attention of the person in question. He participates fully. In this way the individual grows

as a person and accumulates cultural capital. This allows him to better shape his life, fitting himself with an identity and orienting himself in today’s society. The individual edifies himself through high quality cultural experience, as it were. In this scenario, art and culture provide a fundamental enrichment to personal life. On the frame of reference

Enter business and management

To prop up professional practice in art and culture and properly manage scarce resources, a greater business involvement and a strong vision of management are now found necessary. Professionalization continues to increase. Economic and organisational goals remain framed within a cultural and artistic finality. Sensible business administration and high management skills are thus applied in order to realise cultural and artistic goals, both within the arts sector and within the local culture policy. Enter the flexible individual

Earlier, ‘public advancement’ was framed more in a social context. People saw it as a group dynamic. Today, emphasis lies in the development of the individual. So everyone has a personal duty - or is at least invited - to develop themselves culturally. This requires the individual to be flexible, and to want and be able to try out different art forms. After the partial disappearance of compartmentalisation within which the social context played a major role, and the complete rollout of the consumer society, this flexible individual appears prominently in the foreground. At first glance, this flexibility contains only advantages. It has become the software of the whole world. It is the core value of each worker to, so to speak, hop from task to task, check Twitter

This story also has drawbacks. Going deeper becomes difficult; as an employee, to take the space and time to build lasting ties with a certain content, with tasks and with colleagues, is put at risk. A consequence is the ever-increasing scarcity of the unbound public space. Shopping complexes, Christmas markets and Bargain Sundays give the visitor the sensation of lingering in a public place - a forum: the ultimate aim remains to consume, preferably as much as possible. Towards empowerment in the public space

Today, cultural and artistic organisations and institutions still offer this public space and the corresponding chances of enrichment, rest, relaxation and meeting. This concerns the physical place as well as the mental space. In cultural and community centres and libraries one can linger without the pressure to consume and can opt for a range of high quality activities, or just rest. In that sense, it is not surprising that for several years already, libraries have provided a haven for students during exam study periods. It’s a place where people still find rest (the quality) as well as friends and colleagues (the social and binding). It is a constant for these places: people who go there are consciously involved in art and/or culture. Whether it concerns a reflective, receptive or active occupation, from studying to artistic creation: in these places there is space, and one can focus, as per the slogan “nothing must, much can”. The public space is therefore a relatively free space. This brings us to a rephrasing of the idea of Bildung: it’s about empowering individuals in the public space rather than proselytising. The social dimension emerges once again: the task of forming a community that has local cultural actors is just to give that individual a place in a social dimension. It is also logical: one almost never occupies the public space alone. Through cultural or artistic dialogue, the individual can take up responsibility, expand himself, and discover top quality products and/or processes. The role of the local culture professional then readily evolves: from programmer and provider of cultural capital to the involvement of people

Toward Process Management of a Public Space — Miek De Kepper, Maja Coltura and David Vande Cauter

The frame of reference that the local culture professional uses for his selection is, in the art and culture sector, rather monochrome. Often, it’s a highly educated white person who was taught by their equals, read their books and also saw their compeer at work on stage. Through the artistic choices that form this rather monolithic world, one comes to a meaningful significance in the artistic and cultural field. The cultural and artistic landmarks are set by the same group.

after the concert, be immediately au fait with the latest technology and buy a new smartphone every year. Speed and flexibility are keywords in our competitive society.

in those choices and the debate surrounding it. In this way, everyone is responsible for the interpretation of the public space. The culture professional guides, connects, and, at the right time, lets go. The finality of this process can vary widely: does the process itself prevail or the end product? And what is that end product then? A social or artistic result?

And the artist?

Whoever today, as an artist, wants to obtain a fresh insight into the public, can astonish with a quest for the formulation of values. It is then up to the public to go through the proposals and to develop the potential. Thus, the common, the solidary and the caring in our consumer society have little chance. These values are not profitable in economic terms. Also, the pillars of society, who traditionally appropriated these values, have largely disappeared. Art and culture can fill this social void in a pluralistic manner and give it new meaning. Until recently, art rather seemed to go in the opposite direction, wanting to detach itself from these values. Now, subversity is situated, ironically enough, in the converse. Therefore, community - which is not the same as homogeneity - and the collective responsibility are so important in art and culture: they form a basis for the current competitive consumer society to think otherwise. From stammering ... ... to articulating

What do these insights mean for the artists, for their work and for the local culture professional in libraries and cultural- and community centres?

The local cultural field potentially plays an important role here as a distribution site for these artists. Thus the work of art is documented in the library and becomes verbalised and represented in the cultural- or community centres, or other public places. The selection of artwork by the culture professional remains important, but over time we see a significant change in his role: he has also become a facilitator. In which framework, in which circumstances, do artworks and the associated community best thrive? Which conversation is in which manner ideally entered into? What kind of engagement is expected from each player (public, culture professional, artist and artwork)? This is not actually a new assignment. The local cultural players are indeed rooted in the socio-cultural tradition and not in the arts. That’s why they fulfil both the role of distributor of the arts and culture, yet at the same time facilitate a social process. They monitor it and give it shape. The local cultural field is in that sense a public space that can be very broadly interpreted. Sometimes narrowly, for instance, in facilitating a meeting for an association, sometimes widely, in administering an artistic and professional injection into a cultural process. Fascinating local processes combine both worlds: the artistic and the social then intervene in one another. Think about the amateur theatre group that for years brings the same kind of theatre to the same public. If their purpose is purely social, this can long continue. There is a social but clearly monotonous process underway. Inducing a mild confrontation by, for example, bringing in a professional director, can import an enrichment of the individuals and the group as a whole.

Toward Process Management of a Public Space — Miek De Kepper, Maja Coltura and David Vande Cauter

Experiencing art is all about wonder and discovery, a process that one passes through on one’s own initiative and in conversation with others. Simultaneously, there is nothing wrong with the cultural, where relaxation and encounter prevail, as long as the discovering and the reflecting receive sufficient space. The local culture professional monitors this balance, which, dependent on the goal, may be inclined toward one side or the other. Manu Claeys summarised this intimate bond rather nicely: “art as incantation, culture as party”.

Artists present work in the public space. In so doing, they enter into dialogue with their audience; sometimes they do so literally and, in any case, it always happens via their work. In this work, the good artist has ‘processed’, imagined a shard of the future, of the shifting social paradigm. The urgencies of the time are thus given form. Usually that image is not obvious to observe in the society itself and the artist looks for words, for a language and/or for shapes to articulate his glimpse. Ideally, the public should be invited along to articulate as well: everyone in that particular public space is at that moment a partner in crime. All partners invest, and thus a community is created.

Thus, the local cultural sector forms the humus for the social as well as the cultural as well as the artistic. Different artists take their first artistic steps in a project like the Kunstbende at Villanella art centre. Kunstbende branched out of Villanella within different cultural- and community centres throughout Flanders. The local culture professionals then play to the full their role as networker and facilitator: on invitation of Villanella, they address their contacts in the local civil society, the schools and the Arts Education. Both the public and the artist are thus encouraged to participate. There is a local cultural and social dynamic.

Toward Process Management of a Public Space â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Miek De Kepper, Maja Coltura and David Vande Cauter

E n s e m b l e s Cases

Case 1 L’Internationale Collaboration

L’Internationale is the name of a trans-institutional collaboration consisting of four European museums and an organisation for artists’ archives. Contrary to the ambitions of canon formation and hegemony in the largest contemporary art institutions, L’Internationale stands for a collaboration that wants to thematise the diversity and complexity in contemporary art traditions. This project aims to connect its own specific perspectives and stories to the rhizomatic thinking that makes the meaning of contemporary art more visible. The founders of L’Internationale are Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; the Július Koller Society, Bratislava; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; and Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA). Each institution has in the past expressed the concern for different forms of local insights and experiences as well as for wider European and global art questions. From its collections, this collaborative project investigates a renewed image of art between the mid-1950s and mid-1980s. Counter to ‘Americanism’, with its formalistic genealogies and contextual approaches onto which amendments want to be made, searching for ways in which substantial artistic relationships can be cultivated from diversity. Besides this, L’Internationale strives for common platforms of methodology in various museum-related areas, such as collection forming, archiving, publications, mediation, conservation and management, presentation, education and research. Via M HKA Ensembles, M HKA wants the public to participate in the researched relationships and narratives. This project comprises three ensembles: Museum of Parallel Narratives, Museum of Affects and Spirits of Internationalism, with each part of the ensemble based on affinities in, respectively, perspectives (a central European glance at the partners), affects (stakes in the artist, intensities that can also be observed by and in the spectator) and internationalism (the surpassing of the ambitions of one’s own art scene).

MUSEUM OF PARALLEL NARRATIVES About MUSEUM OF PARALLEL NARRATIVES

Body Language Repetition Death Personal Rituals Cosmology Spaces of encounter Collective Methods Forms of Totalitarism Unpositioned Objects

Related Event: Museum of Parallel Narratives. In the framework of L’Internationale, MACBA, Barcelona, Spain, 14 May 2011 - 02 October 2011

Understanding the world by making it visible making invisible energies visible Using the world as material for ironical critique Articulating the world as immediacy Articulating the world as semantics Enhancing intensity - articulating the Self in the world as experience. Unpositioned Objects Related Event: Museum of Affects. In the Framework of L’Internationale, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 26 November 2011 - 29 January 2012

SPIRITS OF INTERNATIONALISM About Spirits of Internationalism

The Concrete The Engaged The (Dis)Located The Universal The Positioned The Transcendental The Subverted The Essential Unpositioned Objects Related Events: Spirits of Internationalism, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium, 20 January 2012 - 29 April 2012 / Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 21 January 2012 - 29 April 2012

CASE 1 — L’Internationale

MUSEUM OF AFFECTS About Museum of Affects

Desire for actual social change - critique of the system Desire for actual social change - critique of the mass media Desire for symbolic change - creation af alternative systems Understanding the world by making it visible making invisible structures visible

87 Installation view at Museum of Parrallel Naratives. In the framework of L’Internationale at MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona), Barcelona (Spain) 14 May 2011 — 02 October 2011

©image: MACBA, Rafael Vargas

CASE 1 — L’Internationale

The first exhibition in the L’Internationale series focused on the difference in contextualizing stories and confronted the Arteast 2000+ Collection in Ljubljana with the reality of MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona). In a mini-exhibition, Mladen Stilinovic, a commended artist from the important art scene in Zagreb, not only selected Robert Filliou but also Paul De Vree, Danny Matthys and Toon Tersas. The dress Omo wast niet alles wit by Toon Tersas, shown here in front, was presented in the exhibition entrance hall.

Installation view at Museum of Affects. In the framework of L’Internationale at Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana (Slovenia)

Installation view at Museum of Parrallel Naratives. In the framework of L’Internationale at MACBA, Barcelona (Spain)

26 Novembre 2011 – 29 Januar y 2012

In Museum of Affects, the second L’Internationale exhibition, and also the opening show of the new contemporary art museum building in Ljubljana, research was carried-out on how relationships can be established between artists from different contexts on the basis of their substantial efforts. One of the resulting part-ensembles was ‘Enhancing perception – articulating the world as immediacy’ seen here to the right behind the Richard Hamilton (from MACBA), and some works from M HKA: Throwing 3 balls in the air to get a Straight Line by John Baldessari, Intellectual Murder Shoes by James Lee Byars, Ed Ruscha’s artist’s book, and drawings by René Heyvaert. Together with Stanley Brouwn, On Kawara, Jiri Kovanda and Josip Vanista, they illustrate this affect stated in the title.

14 May 2011 – 02 October 2011

©image: MACBA, Rafael Vargas

©image: Moderna Galerija

On the opposite wall the IRWIN group, presented Guy Mees’ Portraits (1974), his well-known video featuring three people, one of them standing on one concrete block, a second on two concrete blocks and a third on the floor, next to a video by the OHO group from Ljubljana dating from the same period.

Installation view at Spirits of Internationalism at M HK A, Ant werp

20 Januar y 2012 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 29 April 2012

ÂŠimage: M HKA

The concrete suggests an concession towards the abstract that is very different than the sort initiated by American abstract expressionism, where it served as a passage into a cosmic experience. The more European focus on the concrete (in which Venezuelan artist Gego was also included) is based on our physical and sensory existence, as shown here by Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni and Jan Schoonhoven. Antwerp artist Van Hoeydonck was also placed in the concrete category, with his plexi reliefs that perfectly resonate with the work of his artist-friends at that time. The most remarkable work in this space is a copy of Fallen Astronaut, a small aluminium sculpture that was brought to the moon by Apollo 15 in 1971, and is the only work of art there.

Installation view at Spirits of Internationalism at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands 20 Januar y 2012 – 29 April 2012

CASE 1 — L’Internationale

The exhibition Spirits of Internationalism examines how in the period prior to globalisation (1956 - 1986) in which localisation was tied to the nation-state, with the limitations thereof, artists attempt to transcend. One of the ways of doing that was through a thematisation of this concrete ‘locality’ or ‘spirit’ that is presented partly in the M HKA, with artists like On Kawara, André Cadere and Stanley Brouwn, and partly in the Van Abbemuseum, with here, on the right, Jef Geys, an artist who worked on the ‘cradle to cradle’ concept long before the idea was thematised.

©image: Van Abbemuseum, Peter Cox

Case 2

Jimmie Durham Archive Archive versus Research

M HKA thinks in terms of ensembles and takes as its starting point the interplay of everything that artists see as intrinsic parts of their artistic practices. It is not only the work of art itself that is significant. The question arises of gathering together worthwhile ‘special items’ that give rise to meaningful insights. In addition, contemporary digital culture provides possible valuable ways that research into this can be carried out, shaped and/or made public. By means of M HKA Ensembles, M HKA collects, digitises, contextualises and preserves visual and textual material that enables it to achieve an overview and gain an insight into the broader oeuvre of artists such as Jimmie Durham. Jimmie Durham (b.1940; Washington, Arkansas, USA), who now positions himself as ‘a homeless Eurasian orphan’, is one of the leading artists in Europe at the beginning of the twentyfirst century. M HKA is committed to the first ever comprehensive retrospective, from his work in the early 1960s in Geneva to the work from the 1980s with which, coming out of his activism in the American Indian Movement, he sought a position in the arts scene, to his production of the last two decades, as enshrined in various European countries. M HKA is also working on a catalogue raisonnée for Durham and an overview of his writing. Durham is indeed also of great importance as an essayist and poet. Besides the material already collected from the own documentation centre, library and museum, material is brought together and described through close contact and consultation with the artist, and the curators and galleries committed to him. Artworks, images and texts are examined and

linked, resulting in relevant ‘ensembles’. Of particular interest with Durham, are the initial moments in which groups of related works and other activities, like texts, often arise. The meaningful clusters are therefore primarily based on events in time. Jimmie Durham takes the specific situation (human, cultural, social, spatial...) as the basis for new work. It is not only about exhibitions. A workshop can also have led to the production of videos, a sculpture, a statement or poem, often connected with one another. Furthermore, the (digital) materials here are more like well-organised thematic ensembles (related to appearance). Based on this (personal) artist’s archive, an image is formed of the artist within his broad range of activity. A sustainable archiving of a barrel full of meaning.

EXHIBITIONS Jimmie Durham 1964 - 1972 Jimmie Durham 1980 - 1993 Jimmie Durham 1994 - 2011

Stoning Eurasia Architecture Pvc tubing

Performative

Installations Sculpture Performance Video Photography

Objects Images

WRITER Bibliography

Statements Essays Poetry Jimmie Durham Archive Background

Exhibition Book Reader

Drawings Prints Photographs Self-Portraits

Correspondance Interviews Activism

Installation Sculpture Performance Video Photography

Workshops Teaching

Case 2 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Jimmie Durham Archive

Projects

ARTIST Exhibition History

M HKA

Installations Sculpture Performance Video Photography Drawing Collage Assemblage Text Book Object Print

A Stone from Metternich’s House 1996

Collection of the artist

This photo by Maria Thereza Alves shows an artwork just before it was made. The glass display case is now part of a private collection. In this image, the full intensity of the confrontation hangs in the air. The image makes certain that we do not forget the performative side of Durham’s work. It’s part of the broad field of work where stones amend a variety of human constructions. Destroying, one would be inclined to say, but at the same time we realise that it’s more than that. Stoning is a separate category in M HKA Ensembles.

Collection M HK A, Belgium

Jesus/Es geht um die wurst, was acquired by M HKA as an isolated figure. The work possesses that quality; a classical sculpture of a complex human form in which life and death, day and night, image and feeling, body and machine merge into one another. At the Fridericianum in Documenta IX it featured as the central figure in the ensemble, entering into an interplay with a range of other sculptural elements, an architecture. Some of these are now also in the collection, others are privately owned. The installation also extended to the outside, with a set of elements that ran to the Aue river, as a kind of pump station in which a form comprising of PVC pipe seemed to look back at the Fridericianum. A short text by Durham, An Approach to Love and Fear, thematises that unsolvable duality whereby we build architecture in order to shelter ourselves from the elements, and then look longingly at the nature we abandoned.

©image: Maria Thereza Alves

©image: M HKA, Jochen Verghote

Jesus/Es geht um die wurst 1992

Self-Portrait Pretending to be Euroman (Europe Photograph Series), 2008

St-Frigo 1996

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Collection of the Ministr y of Culture, Portugal

Collection Christine König Galerie, Vienna

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This photo is part of a long series that Durham started when he returned to Europe in 1993. Whenever the word ‘Europe’ was within sight, like on the sign of a closed café, the name of a metro station, this simulacrum was captured. These greetings from Europe - perhaps because they are more than self-portraits - are part of his positioning as a ‘homeless Eurasian orphan’.

©image: Maria Thereza Alves

Case 2 — Jimmie Durham Archive

©image: Maria Thereza Alves

St Frigo is now owned by the Portuguese State and was made in a courtyard in Reims in a lengthy meeting of cobblestones and a refrigerator. This work was a favourite of Harald Szeeman, who saw it as a metaphor for Europe. It’s one of four refrigerators in Durham’s oeuvre, and also belongs in the stoning category. As the image makes clear, it was once surrounded by stones.

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Collection of Stichting Beeldende Kunst Middelburg/De Vleeshal

Gilgamesh, the work with a keyhole in the short side of the door (so that one can maybe peep inside the door), is, in Durham’s oeuvre, one of the many moments of reflection on the oldest written epic in the world, that of the king of Uruk who built walls around the city to protect it against external threats. It’s one of the central images of the relationship between man (with his civilisation) and his world. This work, made for the white spaces of M HKA during Antwerp Cultural Capital year in 1993, is now part of De Vleeshal Collection in Middelburg, which is on permanent loan to M HKA.

Case 2 — Jimmie Durham Archive

©image: M HKA

Gilgamesh 1993

Case 3 Homage to Bernd Lohaus Grasp

Bernd Lohaus (b.1940; Düsseldorf – d.2010; Antwerp) was a key artist but also a key person in the art scene he helped develop. After his death in 2010, his family and artist-friends organised a moment in the M HKA in which to give him further attention. Several performances and artistic moments took place around a kitchen cupboard that formed part of his personal living environment. This ‘ensemble’ is the precipitate thereof. Now, one year later, all material on this subject was gathered up, described and structured. Because M HKA wants to remember Bernd Lohaus as an artist through the works that it possesses, but also as an inspirational man, and as both simultaneously through the testimonies of artists.

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Event

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Nested Event Related Items Ensemble

Homage Bernd Lohaus

Performances (Immaterial) Objects (Material) Narrative & Archive Case 3 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Homage to Bernd Lohaus

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©image: M HKA, Bram Goots

In order to remember Bernd Lohaus, who died 5 November 2010, M HKA brought a tribute. Interventions of befriended artists and small performances were centered round a special kitchen, designed by Pohlschröder and owned by Bernd Lohaus.

Untitled a performance by Francis Schmetz & Claire Lavendhomme ©image: M HKA

ACTE 1: Front contre front (voyelle consonne). Claire prendra appui contre l’armoire (pied + dos). Moi je prendrai appui contre le front de Claire (voyelle: féminin, consonne: masculin). Prononcer-cracher-déposer-hurler-soufflerfrapper-hurler-chuchoter... ACTE 2: Seul. Je dois monter avec un petit instrument de musique sur l’armoire : assis sur l’armoire lisant et jouant des textes.

Dort / Hier (Museum / Künstler – Warum?) - Bernd, der Kampf geht weiter...

Andrew Webb, Untitled 2011

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Andrew Webb sent a VHS tape with the number ‘9’ painted in red, a yellow ribbon attached and also with a card with the inscription ‘zogar vier stifter’ and an ink stamp.

Case 3 — Homage to Bernd Lohaus

©image: M HKA

DDV (Danny Devos, °1959 – Ant werp)

©image: M HKA

DDV made a sticky version of Raum (1979, this was the first work DDV saw of Bernd Lohaus) and he introduced us a problem ... who will destroy the work?

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Remnants of the performance ‘Untitled’ by Marc Rossignol, Homage Bernd Lohaus, M HKA, 2011 (©image: Bram Goots)

Case 4 Allan Sekula/ Dockers’ Museum Dockers’ Museum

In 2010 in Antwerp, Allan Sekula launched plans for a museum that’s a radical critique on the massive passion for collecting and inherent superficiality in the early twenty-first century. The Dockers’ Museum is an undivided possession in which the objects symbolically belong to the museum as supporter of the public domain, and the museum and the insights belong to the artist. The museum starts with each individual object, unimportant in terms of the market, and draws attention to the contents that can therein be observed. The theme is the dockworker as the personification of a transition zone between land and ship, a dynamic and vital border area. This museum is contextualised in M HKA Ensembles, including the exhibition from which it is derived, Ship of Fools, the artistic result of a ship that toured round the world in an exhibition in which the international union thematised the effects of the free market on the seas and from which the M HKA acquired photos of the core group of portraits of the crew.

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117 Ship of Fools

Allan Sekula archive

Events stuctured in space (Antwerp, Sao Paulo)

Sections in Ship of Fools

The Crew, the pilot & the Russian girlfriend Quotes within Ship of Fools Other works within Ship of Fools

About Ship of Fools

Archive on Ship of Fools Statements on Ship of Fools Texts on Ship of Fools

About Allan Sekula

Biography of Sekula General information on Sekula

About the work of Allan Sekula

General information on the works of Allan Sekula

About Dockers’ Museum

Archive on the Dockers’ Museum Statements on the Dockers’ Museum Texts on the Dockers’ Museum

Sections in the Dockers’ Museum

The port of Santos Bureau of Mines The bombing Section Curie-Einstein-HiroshimaNagasaki-Three Mile Island-Chernobyl-Fukushima Division Verticality of the human spine Unpositioned materials Packaging …

Exhibitions of the Dockers’ Museum

Events structured in space

Case 4 — Allan Sekula

Dockers’ Museum

Exhibitions of Ship of Fools (as EVENTS)

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Case 4 — Allan Sekula

Installation view from Crew, pilot, and Russian girlfriend (Novorossiysk), 1999-2010 at the 29th São Paulo Art Biennial – There is always a cup of sea to sail in, 2010

This exhibition image shows a series of portraits of the crew members of the ‘Global Mariner’, acquired by M HKA in the setting of the 29th São Paulo Art Biennial. The Antwerp project Ship of Fools was planned as a double, with the São Paulo Art Biennial serving as the second venue.

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Inter view Allan Sekula in the context of Ship of Fools

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©image: M HKA

Figuring in the Antwerp version of Ship of Fools, this model of a container ship was made by the technical staff at M HKA, on direction of the artist, with the most significant of the ‘cheap flags’ or ‘flags of convenience’ displayed at the entrance to the entire Ship of Fools exhibition. This installation is now part of Dockers’ Museum, as a variation, with a bulk carrier realised for an exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute, which Sekula calls the ‘temporary west coast version’.

A conversation between Allan Sekula and Grant Watson with the Schelde river in the background, was mounted as an introduction to the Antwerp exhibition. Sekula is committed to the Antwerp situation and amongst other things, is well aware of the situation in Doel.

Portrait of Allan Sekula, 2010 This portrait of Allan Sekula – was taken in front of Churn clockwise 1 rpm, a projected slide showing a slowly rotating horizon and the slipstream from a boat. The sun indicates in which direction the boat is going.

©image: M HKA

“N” Scale Handmade Container Ship Model (27 L”)

Box of a Foghorn from a Japanese ship

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In the Antwerp exhibition, Allan Sekula illustrated the discursive basis of the project by way of a series of short texts prominently presented. M HKA keeps these as part of the context of the exhibition, and also of his series of works.

Case 4 — Allan Sekula

©image: M HKA

Quote from Allan Sekula in the exhibition Ship of Fools

©image: M HKA

‘Packaging’ is actually a separate section of Dockers’ Museum, with, as a highlight, a model in tropical timber made in the Philippines; from ‘Fat Man’, whereof the atomic bomb was dropped on the port of Hiroshima. Despite the inscriptions, it passed unhindered through U.S. Customs. The foghorn was acquired from an Indian through eBay for $349, almost certainly due to the demolition of a Japanese ship in India. Its sound can be heard a mile-and-a-half away.

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Dockers’ Museum was created as part of a project, in the knowledge that it would travel to Sao Paulo after Antwerp. At that time, the São Paulo Art Biennial was just a prospect, but it did determine all the items in Dockers’ Museum, which includes a series of picture postcards from Santos beach before it became the largest port in Latin America.

Case 4 — Allan Sekula

©image: M HKA

Photo of the beach of Santos before it became a harbor

Case 5 Graphology

Notes or laptop?

The choice of a specific medium automatically leads to a number of side effects. Just as we have long since switched from a chirographic to a typographic culture, so has the verbal culture also radically changed through technological developments. We are less and less frequently in contact with the direct translation of a physical process to a blank sheet of paper. Diverse notation and storage systems now determine not only our communication with others, but also our relationship to our own thinking and memory. In four episodes, Graphology explored the automatisms that can manifest via drawing: the human hand as barometer of an inner life, but also, conversely, the ‘mechanical unconscious’ of the machine, which imposes itself on the human eye. In what way do graphic reproduction techniques lead their own life? It was a series of exhibitions on the cutting edge of drawing, with photography, printing, film and computer graphics. A work-in-progress, run through with formal solutions and substantive lines. Sought is a clear division of content into ‘chapters’. Each episode has a specific thematic approach. At the same time, each section is autonomous and at the same time, typical of the other parts. With Graphology, the intention was to develop a methodology in which classical themes and figures from contemporary art, from a media-archaeological point of view, are considered.

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Bibliography

Statements in Graphology Photography Typography Computer Graphics Cinematography

Exhibitions of Graphology

Lonely At The Top, Graphology, Chapter 1, M HKA, Antwerp, 18/02/2011 - 27/03/2011 Lonely At The Top, Graphology, Chapter 2, M HKA, Antwerp, 08/04/2011 - 13/06/2011 Lonely At The Top, Graphology, Chapter 3, M HKA, Antwerp, 24/06/2011 - 14/08/2011 Lonely At The Top, Graphology, Chapter 4, M HKA, Antwerp, 25/08/2011 - 25/09/2011 Graphology, The Drawing Room, London (UK), 10/05/2012 – 30/06/2012

Case 5 — Graphology

Sections in Graphology

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Installation view from Lonely at the Top Graphology, Chapter 1 with work from Ulrik Helthoft (Reverse Glove, 2005)

P. Ber ville, Chambre Claire Universelle (Lonely at the Top Graphology, Chapter 1)

This Chambre Claire Universelle by P. Berville is an instrument used to draw ‘from the natural model’ as described in the manual of the time. It is an invention dating from the early 19th century and attributed to William Hyde Wollaston, doctor, chemist and physicist.

©image: M HKA

Case 5 — Graphology

©image: M HKA

Literal graphological studies were not included in the Graphology- exhibitions rather the title info accompanying the works was handwritten directly on the wall.

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Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Monopolar cells from the retina of a bee, drawing, 1890-1915

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In the decades prior to World War I, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the Spanish Nobel Prize winning biologist, mapped the neural anatomy of insects and compared the cell circuit with the vision-processing neurons in honeybees. He imagined a honeybee, with its miniscule brain, and how it could perform tasks like navigating between mazes and landscapes.

Case 5 — Graphology

This time too, young artists who are still new in the museum world were introduced in Lonely at the Top. Stefaan Brüggemann (Mexico, 1975) locates text in a particular space. In 12 text pieces on top of each other he enters into dialogue with the place and its history and thereby also comments on movements in recent art history.

©image: M HKA

Installation view from Lonely at the Top Graphology, Chapter 2 with the work 12 text pieces on top of each other (2008) by Stefan Brüggeman

Installation view from Lonely at the Top Graphology, Chapter 4

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25 August 2011 – 25 September 2011 with work from Luis Recoder & Sandra Gibson (Light Spill, 2006) ©Sandra Gibson, Luis Recoder & M HK A

©image: M HKA

Man Ray, Le retour à la raison, 1923 Collection Centre Pompidou, Mnam/Cci, Paris

The start of the film illustrates a photographic technique used by Man Ray, the ‘rayograph’, in which, unlike traditional photography, an object is placed between a light source and a light-sensitive film. In the final seconds Man Ray filmed the naked torso of his model Kiki Montparnasse.

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recorder are collaborating since 2001 on a series of installations and performances in which they experience an impressive evocation of light and space. They focus on the projected image and the cinematic medium as a device, without the recourse or figuration and use the light to investigate the boundaries between the tangible and substantial. In Light Spill, a slowly mutating film sculpture, a 16 mm film is projected, but not wound back. The result is a squiggly line that grows into a mountain film on the floor of the museum.

‘P.O.V window’, performance by Line Boogaerts at the opening of ‘Lonely at the Top, Graphology –Chapter 1’, M HKA, 2011 (©image: M HKA)

Case 6 Panamarenko / Workstation Biekorfstraat Inventory

Besides the Jimmie Durham ‘ensemble’, there’s also the monographic ensemble about Panamarenko’s Workstation Biekorfstraat. Panamarenko (b.1940, Antwerp), often reduced to the artist of aircrafts that didn’t fly, donated his home and contents to the M HKA in 2007. The house is one large artistic environment, a treasure house of his artistic practice. This studio of Panamarenko’s is for M HKA the zero-point of the collection: the complexity of art will always lie somewhere other than in the museum. The Biekorfstraat is both an artistic monument as an archive of objects and references many elements that contribute to a better and wider understanding of the work of Panamarenko. M HKA has the task to manage this heritage site and does so primarily in a PPP (Public Private Partnership), which provides support to the Panamarenko Collective. Together with the Collective, M HKA is currently working on a digital access and would also like to expand into a field of research on the complexity of Panamarenko as a thinker, performative artist and creator of unforgettable works of art. To render this diversity and the complexity of the contents manageable, an inventory was conducted, which then classified the items into ‘ensembles’ and ‘clusters’. Only in this way, for example, one can distinguish Panamarenko’s personal tools from the anonymous arsenal of tools, such as a random screwdrivers or welding goggles. This classification into ensembles, as well as the allocating of a specific object to a particular ensemble, is arbitrary, but it allows the contents of the property to be determined. Such an inventory serves as a visual guide for further research and, aside from that, is essential as an instrument for conservation.

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About Panamarenko About other works of Panamarenko Panamarenko in M HKA

OBJECTS

Art

Tools, Machinery & Equipment Historical Documents

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Academic Works Objects, Experiments & Prototypes Drawings, Studies & Notebooks Multiples Other

Catalogs Posters

Collectibles

Cameras, Stereo Viewers, Projectors & Accessories Model Boxes & Toys Tin Toys Video & Laserdiscs Fossils, Minerals and Coral Periodicals, Magazines & Comics Weapons

Interior Images Reconstruction Images

Case 6 — Panamarenko / Workstation Biekorfstraat

Original Photographs Personal Books, Documents, Cards & Correspondance

Bibliographical Matters

Interior Objects Decorative Objects Tools, Materials & Accessories Architecture

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Dakgoot [Gutter]

Digitale weegschaal’ [Digital scale]

drawing, 1968, PAN-1015

3 x 15 x 17 cm, 1995 – 1999 PAN-044

Art: Panamarenko is the artist known from his aeroplanes, known for his parrots and for his mother; the artist that is good for a wealth of anecdotes. Panamarenko, the friend of Beuys and Broodthaers, Panamarenko, the explorer. But we are sure about this? He produces art, but always reminds one of his early poetic objects; that draw attention because of their material poverty.

Tools, Machinery & Equipment: The more one distances himself from these art-like objects, the bigger the confusion becomes. Mechanic toys and all kinds of curiosities form a seamless transition between artistic thinking and astonishment for natural reality. Everything is dubious in this ensemble, but nothing can be rejected. It’s all part of an artistic universe.

Catalogue The Silver Surfer

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PAN-408

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Bibliographical Matters & Historical Documents: During the dismantling of the house not only designs and sketches reached the surface, also letters to the Nuclear Institute, letters from and to co–workers and gallery owners, childhood pictures, orders, postcards, fax messages, Polaroid pictures, summons and bills. Panamarenko relegated every document into oblivion with the same carelessness; consciously or not. These remarkable documents were digitized, together with the numerous invitation cards, posters, catalogues and proofs that produced Panamarenko’s oeuvre. Also the numerous technical catalogues about aviation and space travel in general, lifting capacity and alternative drive mechanisms in particular, are part of this unordered ensembles of documents of historical interest.

Case 6 — Panamarenko / Workstation Biekorfstraat

PAN-1078

Collectibles: Next to these ‘work of art likes’, there is also an ensemble of all kinds of gestures and signals that have not been discarded, they were taken to and preserved in the mind- and workshop of the environment of Biekorfstraat 2. They supply fragments of possible tracks and illustrate that the process of attaching meaning to something can essentially be deduced from non-artistic information: from parrots, tin toys or a diving helmet. They surround the work process with the hammering that brings them to life and force the inquiring gaze back to the instruments, as for example with this picture disk for a Viewmaster.

Beeldschijf voor Viewmaster [Picture disk for Viewmaster]

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Case 6 — Panamarenko / Workstation Biekorfstraat

Houten bananenboom [Wooden banana plant]

Elektrische lintzaag PROXXON [Electric belt saw PROXXON]

PAN-371

PAN-829

Decorative Objects: Panamarenko collected everything, but was no collector in the strict sense of the word. He simply kept everything that fascinated or intrigued him. All was examined, studied and kept in the house, somewhere between the cellar and the attic. All these enchantments have one thing in common: they contain technical as well as playful elements. ‘When you’re always curious, the pure idea comes automatically’, Panamarenko once said.

Tools, Materials & Accessories: Maybe the complete arsenal of tools from the workshop should be integrated as a whole in the ensemble of Panamarenko’s Environment or Collectibles. The workstation had been the artist’s main occupation and preoccupation for many years. Instead, due to the size and specificity of the material a separate category was essential. Here we focus on the individual parts, a close-up of bygone high-technology, materials science and workmanship.

Ensemble of 200 VHS videocassettes @Workstation Biekorfstraat, PAN-1049 (ÂŠimage: Wim Van Eesbeek)

Colophon This book is published on the initiative of Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders (CAHF).

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151 M HKA is an initiative of the Flemish Community and supported by the City of Antwerp, the National Lottery, Klara and Cobra.be

Publication

Concept: Bart De Baere Editors: Evi Bert, Jan De Vree, Anders Kreuger Editors ensembles: Evi Bert, Edwin Carels, Bart De Baere, Anders Kreuger, Chris Straetling, Hans Willemse Authors: Evi Bert, Edwin Carels, Maja Coltura, Bart De Baere, Miek De Kepper, Jan De Vree, Tom Evens, Marc Jacobs, Kristof Michiels, Dieter Roelstraete, David Vande Cauter, Hans Willemse Translations: Jodie Hruby, Steven Tallon Photography: Maria Thereza Alves, Christine Clinckx, Peter Cox, Bram Goots, Wim Van Eesbeek, Rafael Vargas Design: Atelier Olivier Lamy, Brussels Printed by: Steven Print

General director: Bart De Baere Managing director: Eric Krols Team: Jurgen Addiers, Raoul Amelinckx, Bart Baes, Katrien Batens, Evi Bert, Maya Beyns, Carine Bocklandt, Leen Bosch, Els Brans, Myriam Caals, Cecilia Casariego, Tom Ceelen, Ann Ceulemans, Celina Claeys, Christine Clinckx, Ingeborg Coeck, Rita Compère, Ellen Cottyn, Leen De Backer, Dirk De Bauw, Jirka De Preter, Jan De Vree, Martine Delzenne, Liliane Dewachter, Sophie Gregoir, Abdelhouahed Hasnaoui, Ria Hermans, Joris Kestens, Nico Koppe, Anders Kreuger, Renild Krols, Christine Lambrechts, Hughe Lanoote, Kristel Laurens, Sarah Lauwers, Ben Lecock, Viviane Liekens, Maja Lozic, Kristof Michiels, Geertrui Pas, Ghislaine Peeters, Joost Peeters, Anne-Marie Poels, Aïcha Rafik, Ruth Renders, Dieter Roelstraete, Gustaaf Rombouts, Chantal Saelens, Rita Scheppers, Nina Serebrenick, Jeroen Struys, Leen Thielemans, Georges Uittenhout, Annelies Van de Vyver, Jos Van Den Bergh, Chris Van den Broeck, Ria Van den Broeck, Frank Van der Kinderen, Roel Van Nunen, Gerda Van Paemele, Lutgarde Van Renterghem, Kris Van Treeck, Sofie Vermeiren, Nine Verschueren, Erica Volders, Thomas Weynants, Magda Weyns, Kathleen Weyts, Hans Willemse, Yolande Wintmoldes Special thanks to: Maria Thereza Alves, Stefan Brüggeman, Jimmie Durham, DDV, Claire Lavendhomme, Panamarenko, Allan Sekula, Francis Schmetz, Andrew Webb

Colophon

M HKA

M HKA: Leuvenstraat 32, B-2000 Antwerpen T + 32(0)3 260 99 99, info@muhka.be, www.muhka.be All rights reserved © 2011 CAHF and M HKA, the artists, Maria Thereza Alves, Christine Clinckx, Bram Goots, Wim Van Eesbeek (M HKA, Antwerp), Peter Cox (Van Abbemuseum, Rotterdam), Rafael Vargas (MACBA, Barcelona). No part of this publication may be reproduced and/or published by print, photocopy, microfilm or any other means without prior permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978-9-08166-656-5 D/2011/12.509/1 Copies 500

It should be every museum’s ambition to develop its institutional intelligence and its understanding of art. In this book M HKA elaborates a vision of its role in four sections. A theoretical framework is introduced, with notions such as ‘ensembles’, ‘thinking-in-ensembles’, ‘thinkingin-action’ and ‘art hypothesis’. Some case studies show how these might function in practice. M HKA is developing the ‘Ensembles’ software that makes it possible to format complex visual and textual content as ensembles. For this publication M HKA has also commissioned external players to make powerful and illuminating statements about related topics such as the idea of Bildung and its rephrasing in today’s terms, the notion of Creative Commons and the dynamic effects of digital documentation in the field of Cultural Heritage.

Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders

This booklet is initiated and edited by M HKA for Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders (CAHF). Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders is supported by the Flemish Community and is a partnership of M HKA (Antwerp), Middelheimmuseum (Antwerp), S.M.A.K. (Ghent) and Mu.ZEE (Ostend) to promote the Flanders art collection and contemporary art initiatives.