Cocain 7

No. 7

MUSÉE D'ART DE LA PROVINCE DE HAINAUT (BPS22) Contemporary Art Centre in Thessaloniki (CACT)

quarterly • September 2015 • www.cocain.pl • edition 800 copies • ISSN 2299-6893

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface Anna Kompanowska INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................3 Resident Laure Houben, Pierre-Olivier Rollin BPS22: THE PROJECT AND THE PHILOSOPHY .................................................................4 Kendell Geers THE BPS22 AND I ...................................................................................................................14 Anna Kompanowska METAMORPHOSIS – an interview with Pierre-Olivier Rollin, the director of BPS22, The Hainaut Province’s Museum of Art in Charleroi .........16 Comments Magdalena Zięba THE MUSEUM AS A PERFORMANCE AND A SCULPTURE USING THE EXAMPLE OF THE NEW MUSEUMS IN SPAIN (PART 2) .......................................22 Jerzy Olek DEFYING LOCATION .............................................................................................................32 Roman Kubicki DEPRIVATION OF ART’S SANCTITY ..................................................................................42 Interviews Paweł Łubowski CENTRO DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO DE HUARTE (CACH) Interview with Javier Manzanos Garayoa, the director of CACH .............................46 Territories of art Agnieszka Rayzacher ART IN A HARBOUR ..............................................................................................................54 Natalia Goncharova STEEPLECHASE (from the history of museums in Russia) .......................................58 Joanna Sitkowska-Bayle FRAC – FONDS RÉGIONAUX D’ART CONTEMPORAIN – IN BRITTANY ...................62 Aneta Pawłowska JOHANNESBURG ART GALLERY IN THE CONTEXT OF RACIAL TRANSFORMATION IN SOUTH AFRICA ............................................................................64 Interpretations Joanna Bojda “CHERCHER LE GARÇON” IN MAC/VAL NEAR PARIS ...................................................68 Katarzyna Nowak “Homosexuality_ies” INTERDISCIPLINARY EXHIBITION FOCUSED ON THE HISTORY AND CULTURE OF SEXUAL MINORITIES IN BERLIN .....................................................74

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INTRODUCTION Anna Kompanowska This brand new issue of CoCAin we are proudly presenting to you is exceptionally diverse, not only in terms of topics but also culturally and geographically speaking. We will visit a couple of European cities and take you on a trip to distant Africa.

We will definitely give plenty of attention to our special guest – this time it is the Belgian BPS22, the Hainaut Province’s Museum of Art in Charleroi.

The institution has been running for 15 years now and in September 2015 is opening the recently restored rooms of their new headquarters. We have interviewed its director to find out about their plans for the future and to reflect on the condition of contemporary art.

We also look at two French galleries: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vitry-sur-Seine and Brittonic RAC; the latter is extensively described by Joanna Sitkowska-Bayle who introduces us to Jack Lang – the man behind a rather novel initiative: a formula of Local Contemporary Art Collections. A similar issue of contemporary art – only in Russia – seen in a wider aspect is tackled by Nina Goncharova.

We present a selection of interesting exhibitions from all over Europe, beginning with Polish art in Thessaloniki (we have an opportunity to discover yet another post-industrial building converted into an art gallery and presented by the curator Agnieszka Rayzacher) to The Illusion of Light in the Venetian Palazzo Grassi – watch out for some fascinating details of its glorious past – finishing with the complex Homosexuality_ies – the exhibition retelling the culture and history of homosexual* people – the first such extensive presentation devoted in equal parts to homosexual men and women.

Finally, we would like to give you a small taste of what is to come in the following issue. So please check out the introduction to contemporary African art by Aneta Pawłowska. It’s the first portion of the series that we intend to continue in the forthcoming issues as African art is becoming increasingly respected throughout the world.

It’s going to be a great read. Enjoy!

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BPS22: The project and the philosophy Laure Houben, Pierre-Olivier Rollin

BPS22, the Hainaut Province’s Museum of Art in Charleroi, is an exhibition space dedicated especially to art forms focusing on current social issues. The museum’s programme gives prominent space to international artists that deal with greater global issues, such as Kendell Geers, Jota Castro, mounir fatmi and Wang Du, as well as cultural phenomena characteristic of our time, such as the world of media and urban sub-cultures like punk or graffiti, for instance.

BPS22 was previously run by the Visual Arts Sector of the Cultural Affairs Department of the Hainaut Province. In 2012, the work of the Visual Arts Sector was separated from the museum activity at BPS22.

The Visual Arts Sector was a subsequent diversification of the Provincial Commission for Leisure Activities (CPLO). This Commission was created after the First World War for the masses of workers who had free time for the first time in their lives. The organisation of cultural activities was synonymous with intellectual and social elevation, from the point of view of participants.

Although it has been redefined and readapted to the changing realities of the contemporary world, this objective of achieving social elevation by accessing the arts remains the founding principle of BPS22, as well as being considered a form of “democratic development”. The politics of

Entrance. Photo: © Leslie Artamonow

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exhibitions and mediation activity is still based on the idea that culture is a vehicle for democracy, as it allows citizens to view the world they live in in a more critical manner. From this perspective, the primary function of the museum is no longer to provide material for aesthetic enjoyment but to fulfil its function of providing critical education, as much through its exhibition programme and the discursive nature of the exhibitions, as through an implementation of mediation activity.

BPS22 notably organised the following exhibitions: the major Marthe Wéry exhibition; The Colours of Monochrome at the Museum of Fine Arts in Tournai

The One Shot! Football and Contemporary Art exhibition, designed at BPS22, was displayed in Mube, São Paulo during the Brazilian World Cup in 2014, while Europunk!

Punk Visual Art in Europe was shown in Charleroi after Rome and Geneva, but before the City of Music in Paris.

T-Tris, the joint exhibition of the Hainaut Province art collection (6,000 works in deposit in BPS22), the Muhka (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp) and the Mudam (the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg) was also a noteworthy project in the BPS22 programme.

In the space of a few years, the BPS22 team formed national and international collaborations and

Exhibition view, “Mexico: Esperado/Inesperado”, 2010, BPS22. © Photo: Leslie Artamonow

for the European Capital of Culture, Lille 2004; and the Brussels South Airport at the Krinzinger Projekte in Vienna. The following exhibitions were organised by and took place at BPS22 itself: Next Flag. African Contemporary Art; Storage. The Museum Depot; Jota Castro’s Universal Exhibition 2; Honoré δ’O’s The Quest; a recontextualisation of the Belgian contribution to the Venice Biennial; Johan Muyle’s exhibition (No) More Opium for the Masses; and a solo exhibition of the South African Kendell Geers, in partnership with several big international institutions and Mexico: Esperando/Inesperando, from the collection of the mexican collector couple Isabel and Agustín Coppel.

partnerships with widely-recognised institutions.

In Belgium, these institutions include: the Photography Museum in Charleroi and Charleroi/ Dance; the S.M.A.K., Ghent; and the Black, Matrix Art Project, Brussels. Internationally, BPS22 has worked with the following institutions, among others: the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Criée Centre of Contemporary Art, Rennes; the Migros Museum, Zurich; the FRAC-PACA, Marseille; the FRAC-Alsace, Selestat; the Baltic Art Centre, Gateshead; the Museum of Contemporary Art, the MAC Lyon; the Mudam, Luxembourg; the French Academy – Villa Medicis, Rome; and the Mamco, Geneva.

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Beat STREULI, “New York”, 2001, Hainaut Province Collection in deposit in BPS22. Photo: ©Raymond SAUBLAINS

The artwork collections With a wealth of over 6,000 works of art, dating from the end of the 19th century to the to the present time, and including paintings, videos and performance, as well as installations and tapestries and a large archive collection, the Hainaut Province Collection is stored at BPS22.

Today, it is open to artists from Hainaut as well as national and international artists, although the core of the collection is comprised of artists who have a connection to the Province. In order to avoid scattered purchases in Belgium or internationally that would damage the internal coherence of the collection, areas of interest have been defined as follows: art in Hainaut, Surrealism and the relationship between art and different forms of power. These three areas are based on an examination of the relationship between art and the societies which produce it.

From this perspective, it is important to note that the Hainaut Province collection is conceived as a coherent whole rather than a succession of individual representations. The works themselves interact, respond to each other, and mutually ART & LANGUAGE, Mask for a commemorative portrait of Jaurès in the style of Jackson Pollock, 1980. Hainaut Province Collection in deposit in BPS22. © photo : Raymond Saublains

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examine one another, creating multiple networks of meaning between them. This is the function of the structured areas of the collection, now extended to the different prisms of analytical theory presented

by BPS22 in its exhibitions. These theories throw a unique light on the collection and suggest new readings of the work each time. Among others, they include A Small History of Art by B. Gaudichon, Forgotten Line by M. Partouche, Secret History of the 20th Century by G. Marcus and Another Art History by Le Bon and C. Grenier.

Complementary to the Hainaut Province Collection, BPS22 has developed its own collection, notably through the acquisition of numerous documents on punk visual art in Belgium. This gave a new perspective to the historic wealth of Surrealism or the Situationist International. BPS22 has also received significant donations which have enriched its available collections.

Names cited: Art & Language, Gabriel Belgeonne, Hans Bellmer, Marcel Berlanger, Alain Bornain, Marcel Broodthaers, Antoine Bourlard, Pol Bury, Anto Carte, François Curlet, Edith Dekyndt, Jeremy Deller, Wim Delvoye, Wang Du, Eric Duyckaerts, Patrick Everaert, mounir fatmi, Michel Frère, Kendell Geers, Liam Gillick, Martha Grunenwald, Bénédicte

Cindy SHERMAN, “Untitled”, 1983. Hainaut Province Collection in deposit in BPS22. Photo: ©Raymond SAUBLAINS

Banks VIOLETTE, “SunnO))) / (Repeater) Decay / Coma Mirror”, 2006. Hainaut Province Collection in deposit in BPS22, © Reserved rights

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The construction of exhibition hall, 1908. © Reserved rights

Henderick, Jacques Lizène, René Magritte, Marcel Mariën, Xavier Mary, Constantin Meunier, Johan Muyle, Pierre Paulus, Cindy Sherman, Boris Thiébaut, Banks Violette, and Andy Warhol.

The Museum and the architecture BPS22 is located in an old industrial hall of nearly 2,500 m2, within the premises of the Paul Pastur University of Work. A 1911 industrial edifice made with glass and iron, it was erected during the Commercial and Industrial Exhibition in Charleroi for the Fine Arts Pavilion. Once the event finished, these buildings became the premises of the new University of Work which had two objectives: to ensure the education of citizens and to provide industries with every type of worker needed, from industrial workers to technical engineers and chemists. The university site is an illustration of the pre-emptive policy of social elevation which developed in Belgium in the early 20th century.

panels constituting the two great halls linked by the columns. These new materials, glass and iron, were a reference to the industrial wealth of the region. They were used for their technical qualities, their symbolic significance and also for the general aesthetic appearance of the building.

The halls are configured like a classic basilica, with a central nave flanked by two colonnades. This referential architecture is evidence of the “removal of holiness” suggested by social art in the Walloon region at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century: from the church to the factory, with its procession of new martyrs, secular pietàs, and so on. During the Commercial and Industrial Exhibition in 1911, the halls housed the Fine Arts Pavilion. This

Designed by the architect Gabriel Devreux, the Workshops (previously called the Solvay Provincial Building, abbreviated as BPS22 in French) are an architectural whole whose impact is created by historical references, such as the neoclassical concrete colonnade, the symbol of political power perpetuating an ancient social hierarchy. The central row of columns is topped by a curved pediment and flanked by Palladian windows on both sides.

The principal innovation at the time was the glass The Industrial and Commercial Exhibition, 1911. © Reserved rights

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was an exhibition of Walloon art organised by the Minister Jules Destrée, according to his autonomist political manifesto which began with, “Sir, there are no more Belgians”. Considering the surface area of each wing, approximately 1,000 m2, it is likely that the structure of the exhibition space was used for large canvases, which was frequent at the time, on which paintings were hung.

These buildings, now partially listed by the Walloon region, were then filled with workshops for industrial learning, such as clothes manufacturing, masonry or welding. The walls still bear the scars of these subsequent activities. Rebaptised as BPS22, the building became a museum in 2000, recognised as much on a local level as a national or international one.

The New BPS22 Since January 2014, extension work has been transforming BPS22 into the Hainaut Province’s Art Museum.

After more than a year and a half of building works and an architectural renovation project led by Archiscénographie Roland, BPS22 celebrates its reopening on 26 and 27 September within the

Hall for gymnastics. © Reserved rights

framework of Mons 2015, European Capital of Culture. Formerly a space for contemporary creation and only open occasionally, BPS22 is now the Art Museum of the Province of Hainaut and will remain open all year. BPS22 now covers a surface area of 2,500 m2, which makes it one of the largest art museums in the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.

In terms of architecture, this new museum is defined as a “hybrid” place, consisting of various types of spaces, accessible through various levels.

It deploys itself from the inside out, while maintaining an equilibrium with its core through the

The works in wood, 1910. © Reserved rights

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The white box : Dupont Hall. Photo: Š Donald Van Cardwell

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visitors’ entrance lobby. This section of the building was deliberately placed between the two main exhibition rooms to facilitate circulation.

The main building has retained its industrial “rough” look, to which it owes its fame and uniqueness.

This large hall of over 1,000 m2, especially suited to experimental forms of contemporary art and new productions, was simply given additional rails to multiply the options for hanging artworks.

By contrast, the second wing of BPS22 was completely transformed into a huge “white box” covering a floor area of 800 m2. It now meets museum standards and is best suited to museum type presentations. This room is prolonged by two extensions (indoors and outdoors), looking out on to the old Mambourg colliery and the Solvay boulevard.

Several small rooms were created to accommodate smaller artistic projects, “out-of-sync” experiments, original research or more intimate works. The revamped building will also feature a stage for alternative performances or concerts.

Thanks to the diversity of the proposed museum and volume configurations, BPS22 is now the

perfect venue to meet the varying requirements of contemporary creation.

In addition to the lobby, which was totally redesigned to facilitate circulation in and out of the exhibition rooms, including access for the disabled, the focus has been aimed at one of the flagship actions of BPS22, mediation, through the development of two rooms. A third room is also dedicated to community activities involving local residents.

In terms of programming, BPS22 is maintaining its tradition and will offer visitors exhibitions of one or several artists (whether Belgian or international) dealing with societal issues. The opening exhibition The Worlds turned upside down is a significative example. The splendid Collection of the Province of Hainaut and BPS22’s own collection will also be showcased in unique ways throughout 2016.

Exhibition view, Frédéric LEFEVER, “Nous Autres”, BPS22, 2009. Photo: © Leslie Artamonow

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Exhibition view, “One Shot!” Football and contemporary art, BPS22, 2010. Photo: © Leslie Artamonow

Practical info BPS22 Art Museum of the Province of Hainaut Bd Solvay, 22 6000 Charleroi BELGIUM T. +32(0)71 27 29 71 E. info@bps22.be www.bps22.be The Museum is open from Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 7pm. It is closed on Mondays, 25 December and 1 January.

Rates: € 6 / Seniors and groups: € 4 / Students and unemployed: € 3 / -12 years: free.

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THE BPS22 AND I Kendell Geers

I often hear the words “art world” or “art system” these days as though such a thing exists. It is especially rife when people try to make sense of the “art market” as the prices for works of art rise higher and ever higher beyond the limits of reason or sanity. When I think about the $179.4 million spent in May 2015 at Christie’s New York for Picasso’s work Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) I can’t help but wonder what that painting might have witnessed in the artist’s studio before entering the world. What manner of fun and frolic inspired the painting of those women and what did the artist do, amongst trusted friends, in his studio as he distilled the inspiration to create?

There is no such thing as an “art world”, for there are many worlds overlapping. The world of Picasso’s studio is not the same world as that of the former Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, who is reported to have been the buyer. The world of Christie’s majority shareholder, François Pinault, is not the same world as that of DanielHenry Kahnweiler, the first gallerist who tried to sell Picasso’s work. As I write this, my computer autocorrects the spelling of Picasso’s name and that is another world entirely from any that Pablo would ever have known or could have imagined. We cannot generalize about art or its history, much less the details that make the difference between significant, important, historical and the fades of fleeting fashion or commerce.

I have known BPS22 and Pierre-Olivier Rollin, its director, since 2002 when I first met him as he was researching Contemporary African Art. Long before the fashion for Africa swept the market with long lists of indistinguishable trends, Pierre-Olivier Rollin was already there trying to understand the difference between European and African Avant Garde practices. His vision of art is precise as he curates with the sure hand of a surgeon trying to separate the malignant from the benign. Since 2002, I have had the pleasure of working with him and BPS22’s extremely committed small team on many occasions, including my retrospective AutoDa-Fé in 2007. To say that it was a pleasure does not do justice to the experience, for I am not one for flattery. I would rarely use the word pleasure in relation to a curator or an institution for the norm would be to feel abused and instrumentalized by the end of the process.

Without the artist there can be no works of art and without the works of art there can be no market, nor curator, collector, gallery or system. Simple enough, but few understand that it all spins around the works of art and that have been birthed through

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the imaginations and visions of artists. That process of exposing one’s self is never easy, never neutral, never without shame or embarrassment as exposure should be, if it’s true and sincere. Only when one exposes from the heart, with spirit, is it real and not mere exhibitionism. We have lost touch with the strength of art as we have confused it with the power of market. Pierre-Olivier Rollin knows the difference and makes it count.

In a world spinning out of control with climate change and rampant markets, as the world divides between the mega rich and ultra poor, as illegal refugees drown whilst a painting of the words “If You Can’t Take a Joke Get The Fuck Out of My House” sells at auction for $23 million, there are few exceptions that root us to something worth holding on to. Art can change the world but it just does so one perception at a time. Pierre-Olivier Rollin and the team at BPS22 are the midwives and surgeons on standby making sure that we do not get lost and that art remains something worth believing in. I have no doubt that a true artist, like Picasso, would have counted upon him in 1955 as a friend and inspiration, at that moment in the studio when the work of art was nothing more than a virgin canvass in the waiting room of the artist’s imagination.

I know that I count on him, as an artist, as a trusted comrade, as a friend and as a bright uncompromising beacon of light and hope in the darkness of an “art world” spinning out of control. Pierre-Olivier Rollin can be trusted with art and that is not something I can afford to say about many other people in the world I live.

Kendell Geers, “Self portrait, Fuck Face” © Photo: Lydie Nesvadba

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METAMORPHOSIS an interview with Pierre-Olivier Rollin, the director of BPS22, The Hainaut Province’s Museum of Art in Charleroi Anna Kompanowska

Anna Kompanowska: You are the director of BPS22 and are curating the museum’s reopening exhibition simultaneously. This is quite a challenge. What are you more focused on: the exhibition itself or the new building and its functionality?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: It is indeed a very difficult exercise. Overseeing a construction project requires considerable attention. But, generally speaking, a director’s job entails a wide range of tasks, often even too diverse. It is one of the many challenges of our job. Thankfully, I had in mind this exhibition project and had already designed the articulation of the main pieces. I created the show progressively whilst remaining present on site.

Anna Kompanowska: Renovation works often bring different surprises, did you have to alter your presumptions during these works, and did everything go as planned?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: During the eighteen months of building works, my team and I went through various stages of anxiety, doubts, satisfaction and grace-filled moments. Being immersed at the heart of the project does not always allow for the necessary objectivity on the choices made. I find it difficult designing spaces on a plan or simulations and always need to apprehend them physically,

Façade of The Hainaut Province’s Museum of Art in Charleroi Photo : © Leslie Artamonow

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through a bodily experience. Going through an unfinished edifice, when perceptions are distorted, can prove very misleading.

But, in the end, we are reassured. We have created a tool that is well adapted to the various needs that our artists could formulate. From a curatorial perspective, we will be able to work with great ease.

With Archiscenographie Roland, the architectural team that conceived the transformation of the building, we speak of this renovation project as the “manufacturing of a tool” rather than an “architectural gesture”.

Anna Kompanowska: BPS22 is housed in a historic building, which served “non-artistic” purposes – do you feel the breath of history blowing on your back, is it an inspiration for creative activities for you and your team, or maybe you do not think about it on a daily basis?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: During the fifteen years of the centre’s activities, we have worked with the historical data of the former, raw industrial building that we used as a backdrop. Each time, artists created new pieces that were sometimes inspired from local history, such as the works of Kendell Geers, and that then moved on elsewhere. But these works are charged with a particular resonance, with layers of specific significance in our exhibition space. The walls are marked by the stigmata of almost a century of use. The various contextual circles around this place then percolate by capillarity in the exhibition space, influencing, orienting or determining the perception that the public may have of the works on show. In this sense, the experience of art offered in this type of space cannot be delocalised.

Anna Kompanowska: I read on your website that BPS22 is a creative space dedicated to contemporary arts in the field of fine arts, but when I look through your agenda, I see various artistic disciplines present in this place, such as theatre, dance or music. So what are the basic assumptions?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: I found it rather pointless not to exploit this space to complete other projects.

But I wanted the projects on offer to maintain a link with visual arts. This is how we hosted Daniel Buren’s scenography, the Living Theatre, another

by Belgian artist Patrick Corillon, to mention but a few. We shall continue to exploit these possibilities whilst remaining interstitial as opposed to clearly defined areas. I would like to see “unusual format” events that cannot find their place elsewhere but that need places to blossom.

Anna Kompanowska: Your institution has been

Pierre-Olivier Rollin. Photo: ©Transit

in operation since 2000. Will the opening of the new building this year change the nature of your actions, or perhaps your point is just to expand the exhibition space?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: Our large industrial space has sometimes forced us to repeat the same exhibition format that sometimes “imprisoned” us.

We thus tried to deploy other spatial possibilities to offer our artists. Alongside our industrial space, which has just been renovated, we created other types of spaces, mainly a large white box with museological standards and that offers the classical modernist experience of art with its classic trilogy: atopic, aseptic, timeless. When we conceived the renovation, I had in mind the Auto-Da-Fé exhibition that we organised in 2007 with Kendell Geers, and that took place at the same time as the artist’s Irrespektiv show at Gent’s S.M.A.K. These shows, one in an industrial space and the other in a white box, fed a fecund dialectic that I wanted to reproduce with the scale of our building. Thus, we structured our new building around these two large rooms that, once put together, spread out over a total surface area of more than 2,500 square metres.

Furthermore, we also opened projection rooms; smaller, more intimate rooms; a project room, etc.

We now boast a wide panel of spatial possibilities.

Anna Kompanowska: Let’s talk a bit about the collection. I know that your collection is very rich

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with some 6,000 works. What kinds of artists make it up – do you focus on artists from the region, from Belgium, or do you want to create a worldwide collection?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: Our collection boasts more than 6,000 works and spreads from the late nineteenth century to the present time, with a majority of regional artists. The interest of this section of the collection proves more iconographic than artistic, since it literally illustrates the region’s sociological, economic and political activity for more than a century. It was only in the early nineties that a scientific and international acquisitions policy was put in place in a true museum perspective.

Thus, BPS22 became an art museum and is no longer known as a contemporary creation space.

The new name refers to our collection and constant openness.

Today, our collection still remains attentive to regional production but is also open – within the limits of our budget – to worldwide creation. With our expert committee, we try to articulate local and global production in a sort of “glocalism”, which

does not exclude the fact that some Belgian artists should enjoy an international echo. This is the case for Marthe Wéry (1930-2005), one of Belgium’s key artists of the second half of the twentieth century, whose entire body of work we own.

In the same way, we design the collection like a corpus that is analysable in its totality, without fragmenting it in historical or stylistic categories.

Ancient and modern art must constantly be put in a critical perspective, because perceptions evolve and change, sometimes radically. And the best way of showing these evolutions and changes that are often significant, even emblematic of present times, seems to be – in my opinion – by confronting them with contemporary art.

Anna Kompanowska: And what about the status of your collection after the museum’s opening – do you want to present it as part of the permanent exhibition, or expose its fragments for visitors temporarily? How is this collection developing?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: There will not be a “permanent collection” but rather, a “permanence

Marthe Wéry, “Calais”, open series, Hainaut Province Collection in deposit in BPS22, exhibition view, Les Couleurs du monochrome, Tournai, 2004.

Photo: © Philippe De Gobert

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of the collections”. Works from the collection will be shown in temporary exhibits. The collection is a way of working from which we can make propositions to our visitors. These offerings will be propositions from the specific components of our collections.

For instance, amongst the structuring axis of the latter, there is a social and political dimension that reintegrates historical movements, such as Surrealism and Situationist International, in their original subversive component. In the footsteps of Greil Marcus, we link these movements to Belgian punk, as we own many documents of this era. Punk influenced many Belgian artists who produced fanzines, album covers and posters, etc., in parallel to their own artistic creation. Our collection does not focus on the economy of the unique object, but also opens to related productions often erroneously judged as minor.

Within the same framework, we acquired skateboards produced by the French artist Raphaël Zarka and will organise a huge solo show for his work in 2017. On this occasion, he will choose the works to be shown from the pieces in our collection, which will then serve as a counterpoint or prolongation to the discursiveness of the temporary exhibition.

Anna Kompanowska: The Urban Art Biennial in Charleroi, which is organized by you, is a multidisciplinary event as well – how do you understand the concept of “urban art”?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: During the transformation works of BPS22, we wanted to remain active and present on the art scene. This is why we organised a multidisciplinary biennial on new urban practices entitled Asphalte. We showed a selection of artists from the graffiti movement whose preoccupations today are similar to that of contemporary artists on such issues as the role of learning, intergenerational filiation, the construction of collective memory, and the planetary circulation of signs and forms, etc.

These connecting points specifically interested me.

Anna Kompanowska: Contemporary art is not easily perceived – how do you encourage the audience to participate in the exhibitions and events you organize?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: Contemporary art has a difficult time meeting its audiences, and this proves to be particularly true in our region, which is characterised by its nostalgia. In southern Belgium, a region marked by industrial decline and problems in regaining a new economic dynamic, there is a strong feeling of nostalgia for a past that is only remembered idyllically for its economic prosperity,

Jean-Luc Moerman, “Connecting Everything”, BPS22, 2008.

Photo: © Leslie Artamonow

which is long gone. This has led to a rejection of contemporary culture, whether art, architecture, dance or theatre, etc. …

This situation is nothing short of dramatic for living artists. But it is even more drastic when it hampers the overall recovery of society. We can understand the difficulties encountered when faced by the key challenges that the region must face today, when the tiniest change is perceived as a threat: transforming the economy, redeploying activity sectors, reinventing social negotiations, innovating in terms of political organisation and rethinking education, etc.

The veritable challenge of society lies here: developing a true contemporary culture that bathes in the widest acceptance of the term to face the key challenges of the twenty-first century. This is perhaps the fundamental role of cultural institutions like BPS22… Sowing the seeds that will allow the emergence of this contemporary culture. This might be an ambitious project, but it is also an extraordinary motivation for our team.

Anna Kompanowska: Who is your audience – does it consist mainly of young people and students, does the older generation of art recipients visits you as well?

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Exhibition view, Wang DU, “Post-Realitý”, BPS22, 2008. Photo: © Leslie Artamonow

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: Our first audience consisted of contemporary art amateurs from all over the country. As Charleroi is without a university or art school, there wasn’t a veritable audience locally.

But progressively, with all the mediation projects undertaken, we discovered a local audience that follows our activities loyally.

Anna Kompanowska: The new form of institution poses new organizational challenges. Contemporary art centres and museums often play the role of not only cultural but also social life animators – will there be a café, library and cinema in your museum...?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: Although relatively small, the City of Charleroi boasts many dynamic cultural operators in a small perimeter. These operators enjoy well-adapted infrastructures and already offer these sorts of activities. I would rather work with them on occasional projects rather than organise these projects on my own, at the risk of straining my budgets. On the other hand, we have a documentation centre focusing on contemporary art and the relations between art and politics.

Anna Kompanowska: Do you have plans to create a permanent team of curators, or would you rather

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hire external curators for particular expositions, thus collaborating with other exhibition institutions?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: Although we have a team of curators that will conceive our projects, we would like to work with external curators on specific projects that we would initiate or that would be offered to us. External contributions always prove intellectually enriching and bring a new breath of air to a team or an institution. This explains their necessity. During our first fifteen years, we regularly worked with other international institutions, such as Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, Mudam and Casino, Luxembourg’s Forum d’art contemporain, Antwerp’s Muhka, La Criée (Rennes), Zurich’s Migros Museum, Lyon’s MAC, Gateshead’s Baltic, Sélestat’s Frac Alsace, the Academy of France in Rome’s Villa Medici, etc. We will obviously continue these collaborations for, apart from their intellectual advantages, they are necessary for our budget balance. When several art centres and museums start working together, it is much easier to produce more ambitious shows.

Anna Kompanowska: Please say a few words about the opening exhibition. What is its leitmotif?

Pierre-Olivier Rollin: The idea stems from a book

by Mikhaïl Bakhtin that I read a few years ago on

François Rabelais and folk culture. I am perfectly conscious that this notion covers a plethora of ambiguities, even mystifications, and has not ceased – since the eighteenth century – to experience various extensions and refocusing resulting from the various disciplines concerning it (literature, history of art, ethnography, and history, etc.). But a curatorial viewpoint allows a path to be found.

I borrowed the title “Les Mondes Inversés” (The World Turned Upside Down) from the book by the English historian Christopher Hill: The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. The writer was the first in studying pirating as a political counter-model at the root of democracy.

I was extremely interested in the notion that folk culture, more exactly the Bakhtin’s carnival, constitutes a symbolic toppling over of the dominant order, albeit for a very limited time frame.

Fed from other readings, I saw that a fundamental trait of popular cultures is that they constantly maintain a symbolic fight with order. It is a sort of order /disorder dialectic that Stuart Hall apprehends from a sociological perspective as a sort of “constant fight” between low culture and high culture. Joe Scanlan is probably the artist who best dealt with this issue and I am delighted to show his work Le Classisme in the exhibition.

The history of art has shown how artists have regularly drawn their inspiration from the folk repertoire to feed new artistic progress. We need only think of Kazimir Malevich or František Kupka.

But many other contemporary artists do this too, sometimes very critically, like Gareth Kennedy. What I find interesting in these artists is the symbolic way in which, through this gesture, they redefine the terms – albeit temporary – of this symbolic reversal of a specific order. Whether it is a political, religious or traditional order, the artists chosen introduce, using art, a movement of freedom and offer the possibility of a different order for the duration of the exhibition. This is another way of talking politics…

Anna Kompanowska: Thank you for this interview and I wish you the best of luck with all those plans.

Project team BPS22. Photo: Archives of Musée d’art de la Province de Hainaut

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THE MUSEUM AS A PERFORMANCE AND A SCULPTURE USING THE EXAMPLE OF THE NEW MUSEUMS IN SPAIN (PART 2) Magdalena Zięba

Museum as a presentation of the creative personality of the architect.

Currently, the most important thing is that the museum was designed by world-renowned architect1 – Hugh Pearman Buildings that are resisting standardization are the unique architectural premises, such as realizations of Gehry’s or Calatrava’s projects, they operate somewhat outside the unified scenario of museum spectacle. The sculptural form of the museum edifice is an important, even essential, part of the complex structure of objects built by these architects. In the given area, ​​such a strong accent in the form of architectural sculpture works well indeed, because it is a component stimulating the development of urban planning and revitalizing this space. However, in a global context, when so “specific museums” are created in several places of the world, they lose their uniqueness to some extent. On the other hand, they have no chance to become a reference for buildings construction in future, they do not determine, as the modernist cubes did, the only proper typology of museum architecture, as they are primarily the authorial architecture. Also in this aspect they are a performative architecture, they are manifestations of the creative personality of their creator, the emphasis here is put on a spectacular form, which often overshadows facilities located in the vicinity of them.

Beside the mentioned museums, assumptions of the authorial architecture, which is the expression of the creative personality of the architect, are implemented in the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Compostela (CGAC) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA).

As cited in: M. Pabich, O Kształtowaniu Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź 2004, p. 24.

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The building of the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Compostela (abbreviated CGAC, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea) 1988-1993. parquet de Bonaval. Photo: Archives of CGAC

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Façade of the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Compostela (CGAC). Photo: Archives of CGAC

In terms of architecture the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Compostela (abbreviated CGAC, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea 1988-1993) has been classified by Layuno Rosas as authorial structure2 in which a great role is played by the personality of artist, who is creating given building in a distinctive and individual way, without especially stressing its contents. This is the type of museum construction, “walls without museum”3, which is very characteristic of the eighties and nineties in Spain, when the authorities of the various autonomous regions have sought to demonstrate their independence, and a museum seemed like the most appropriate institution for it. The spectacularity of such premises is therefore based primarily on the manifestation of M. Layuno Rosas, op. cit., p. 260 Ibid.

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the creative personality of the architect, who is executing particular and easily recognizable works.

Nevertheless, the in-depth analysis provides also other interesting characteristics of the Centre of Contemporary Art in the capital of Galicia, as its architecture seems to carry only a stigma of dullness and monotony, and it would be hard to associate any spectacularity with it.

The CGAC has been designed by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, and opened in 1993, It is located on a triangular lot in the immediate neighbourhood of the seventeenth-century monastery of Santo Domingo de Bonaval, the monastery of San Roque, the gate Porta do Camiño, and historic houses at Rúa As Rodas and Rúa ValleInclán streets.

There were disputations about the project on how to harmonise the building with the surroundings

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Susan Philipsz, exhibition view, CGAC. Photo: Archives of CGAC

and the architect has been even accused of not applying any of the mimetic practices that would approximate the seat of museum to the historic architecture. However, Alvaro Siza has bet on purism and neutrality, by revitalising the monastery orchard integrated within the ambit of the museum architecture and preserving the existing graveyard likewise4. The receptiveness of architectural environment is manifested here by respecting the dimensions of the historic buildings and the appropriate incorporation of a contemporary architecture, e.g. the located on the south side entrance to the museum chimes with gates to the church and the former monastery.

This structure is pre-eminently a perfect contemporary example of skillful attuning to the historic fabric of the city, in terms of scale, color and material alike, as claimed Gyurkovich.5 Faced with granite like the surrounding buildings it is harmonizing with local tradition, matching the historical architecture in terms of the material used, while concurrently contrasting with the adjacent monastery walls by its horizontal orientation, and facades, devoid of windows. But first and foremost it is the realization of individual vision of the architect, since it is characterized by certain features that constantly appear in the works of Siza,

such as a strong simplification of forms, a sensitivity to the environment through the application of innovative solutions that simultaneously respect the architectural tradition of the given area, and most of all the use of light and texture as the elements producing tension between the forms.

The composition of the museum, designed to reflect the ambitions of the Galician government, has been influenced by the need to create a space that could be maximally transformed. The building was erected on the parcel at the town square adjoining the church, the architect made ​​terraces located on the roof of the new premise its natural extension. Gyurkovich writes that thanks to this the museum itself has blended in perfectly with existing buildings, and coincidentally its presence has led to an increase of the importance of the historic monastery that dominates the seat of CGAC by being complementary to it, “an attractive accent, background and the new field of historic architecture perception”.

Ibid., p. 262.

M. Gyurkovich, Współczesne muzeum w strukturze miasta, Kraków 2007, p. 27.

6 I. Seara, Alvaro Siza. Arquitecto. Centro de Arte Contemporaneo de Galicia, p. 7; O. Bohigas, Alvaro Siza Vieira, [in:] Alvaro Siza. Profesión Poetica, Barcelona, 1988, p. 182.

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Iago Seara points out that architecture realized by Siza constitutes an interpretation of the modernist tradition of rationalism, while being sensitive to the context and highlighting the most creative and artistic aspects of the modernist language.6 The

museum’s layout is based on two overlapping and interfusing geometric forms, shaped as a letter “L”.

Siza has applied an extremely purist architectural language, but avoiding the monotony by skillfully manipulating geometric solids, as there is mutual tension and anxiety developing between them.

The division of functions is based on the structure of the three sectors. The first one, on the north-south axis, in the L-shaped part that is parallel to Rúa Valle-Inclán, includes a basement with the storage area, and a ground floor, where are the museum entrance, the reception, the lobby (being also the entrance to the workshops hall), as well as the administration offices and the library with the documentation center. The next sector, within the second “L” inverted relative to the other, includes the exhibition space in the basement, the bookshop and a café on the first level, and also the entrance to the rear garden and the rooms for temporary exhibitions. The smaller section of the “L” includes the room dedicated to artistic activities on the ground floor, and the exhibition halls on the second level. The third sector is created at the joint of two L-shaped blocks and represents the transition zone lit from the top, the museum’s security is located here, as well as the rooms for temporary and permanent exhibitions. There is also the atrium, where light falling on the surfaces of walls and then flowing inside plays an enormous role.

On the Rúa Valle-Inclán facade a break with the horizontality of the building shape occurs through placing in its lower part the roofed ramp leading to the museum entrance located at the western edge of this facade.

The interior of the museum has a neutral character, however, it affects the visitor by a game of architectural forms and light. Moreover, it is characterised by plasticity and lightness, thus contrasting with the solid shape of the exterior walls. A perennial motif here are unexpected collapses, slants and slopes. The indoor spaces, illuminated by natural light coming through openings in the walls and the upper skylights, are gaining their own poetics. Above the staircase there is a skylight, and in the hall – a rupture in the wall, which makes it one of the most spectacularly lit areas of the building. The aesthetic of exhibition halls is based on purism, but that does not mean that in this case we are dealing with the idea of the white cube; in such a manner Siza realizes the presumption of architectural beauty as a masterpiece in itself, the purity of space has to be another reason for the delight over it, and not over another works of art exhibited in the interiors.

Therefore, as in the case of Richard Meier’s MACBA in Barcelona, the functionality of this architecture has been questioned and after the opening some

Guillaume Leblon, exhibition view, CGAC. Photo: Archives of CGAC

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of the rooms have been converted to the museum purposes7.

The building is a dynamic solid, sometimes even quite aggressive one. The whole premise is composed on the principle of contrast between the old and the new, which constitutes an interesting artistic value, causing the museum to gain sculptural features, through a game of volumes, and to become a kind of performance likewise, because its impact on the immediate environment is significant. This building is refers with its form to the whole urban planning of the city, which, as this architecture, is composed of irregular spaces, rising and declining terrain, where at every turn one encounters stairs, uneven surfaces, and granite buildings.

Considering all these special conditions and circumstances, which had to be included in the architecture of Galician museum, Maria Layuno Rosas poses an important question about the room that remained in this project for a pure, descending from modernism, relationship between the architectural form and the content, which it is intended to accommodate, between a museal typology and certain tendencies in art8. The M. Layuno Rosas, p. 87.

Ibid., p. 265.

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researcher gives a negative answer, arguing that nowadays the museum buildings operate in isolation from the art, as a totally independent creations, in construction and interior destination of which rather more important are clichés or, on the contrary, the ambitions to introduce innovations meant to emphasize the personality of the creator.

But I would take this issue under a bit deeper consideration, because it seems that such a trend of independent modern architecture is very tightly bind to the problems of art theory as well as its practice in a broad sense of this word. It seems that architecture continues the avant-garde current, setting up new trends in favour of freedom of this art. For this is not only the new concept of the museum that affects the architecture of museum, this mechanism works another way around too: the architects have an increasingly decisive influence on the shape of the created works, and since they are guided by the idea of total creative freedom, they without hesitation implement even the most non-functional and sometimes even fantastic ideas.

It could be argued that the function of architecture is primarily its function itself – tailored to the needs of given institution, and that the freedom of creation should in this case be constrained by formal restrictions. But it is a modernist approach, which was discarded shortly after the first mathematical

The building of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), 1989-1996. Photo: Archives of MACBA

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Façade of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA). Photo: Archives of MACBA

experiments that were closely related to the theories of language and culture. The accusation of lack of functionality is archaic in the face of demands placed before a modern museum that is not collecting and exhibiting works of art as much as wrapping them beautifully. The packaging is exactly what is important to attract attention, to be recognizable and distinctive, to carry a positive associations with given place, to become somewhat identified with it. Hence the question about the museum as a sculpture and the museum as a spectacle, the two types of museum that are interpenetrating and mutually interdependent, arising out of the same, mass, commercialized, in the highest degree postmodern trends present in the culture.

In addition, the building of the CGAC should be considered as the perfect realization of the “museum as an image of the city” concept, which M. Pabich cites after Breuer, which, instead specifying the desired look of the museum, described how it should not be: “A museum should not look like a business or office building, nor should it look like a place of light entertainment. Its form and its material should have identity and weight in the neighborhood of fifty-story skyscrapers, of mile long bridges, in the midst of the dynamic jungle of our colorful city. It should be an independent and self-relying unit, exposed to history, and at the same

time it should transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art.”9 It looks like the museum building by Alvaro Siza meets all these requirements.

The main source of inspiration for the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Compostela should be found once again in the works of Le Corbusier, Aalto, and Wright, one may also trace remote echoes of the avantgarde expressionist architecture of Scharoun and Mendelsohn as well as Van Doesburg’s neoplasticism10. Nevertheless, every characteristic of this building should be embraced by the idea of “School of Porto”, formed around Siza’s personality: a preference for simple geometrical solids, often deformed by curves and diagonals, complex spaces communicated in a continuous line, a predilection for traditional materials, particularly granite and white limestone used for the facades, and marble for interior, and glass as well11.

The mentioned above building of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA, 1989-1996) should be qualified as an authorial building too.

M. Pabich, op. cit., p. 162 Ibid., p. 265.

11 J. Sainz, Modernidad Contenida, los arquitectos portugeses a las puertas de un nuevo siglo, [in:] El País, January 15 1994, p. 22-23.

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The emergence of this museum has a complicated history, related primarily to the unfavourable culture conditions at the times of the military dictatorship of General Franco (1936-1975). The origins of the museum dates back to 1959, when the art critics Alexandre Cirici i Pellicer and Cesáreo Rodríguez Aguilera, have pointed out the need of building a museum of modern art in Barcelona and then, along with a specially established group, began gathering a collection that would provide a basis for a future museum. The collection was gathered with the assumption that the new museum would be an active platform for the development of newest art.

Before the right place to erect the building has been found, and before a design competition have been announced, there were couple of exhibitions organized, e.g. of such artists as Moisès Villèlia, Antoni Bonet i Castellana, Àngel Ferrant Vázquez, Jean Fautrier, Albert Rafols-Casamada, Romà Vallès, Jordi Curós, Josep Maria de Sucre, and August Puig.

In 1986, Richard Meier has been appointed as an executor of the project, then finally, two years later, the Museum of Contemporary Art Foundation (Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani) has arisen, and was led by Leopoldo Rodés. Museum as an institution has been officially established in April 1988. The inauguration of the museum took place on 28 November 1995. Since this time the museum was managed by four directors, and since 2008 this function is performed by Bartomeu Marí12.

The previous output of Richard Meier, designer of this project, included numerous other museum realizations, including the New Harmony’s Atheneum in Indiana (1975-1979), the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (1980-1982), the Museum of Decorative Arts in Frankfurt (1979-1984), extension of the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa (19821984), the Getty Center in Los Angeles (1985) Ulm Stadthaus Exhibition & Assembly Building (1986) 13.

Just as in the case of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the realization of this project was a one stage in the spatial revitalization process of the center of the Catalonia capital city — neglected and largely degraded during the reign of General Franco, within the framework of Plan Especial de Rehabilitación Integrada (the project “Del Liceu al Seminari” — “From the Liceu to the Seminary”).

In the years 1989-1999, there was an array of new premises in public spaces, such as parks, squares, and boulevards, created in Barcelona.14 And also this time, the project of museum seat has become the leitmotiv of the city neglected area renewal. On http://www.macba.es.

Richard Meier, arquitecto, 1964-1984, ed. Barcelona, 1986; Richard Meier, ed. V. Vaudou, Paris 1986.

14 M. Gyurkovich, op. cit..

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this occasion, the edifice has acquired an imprint of its creator artistic personality, who establishes structures with the following main themes: a wall integrating the various parts of building that are emerging from it and adopting plastic forms, an interfusion of stereometric solids, item the overlapping of interior and exterior. The white enamel plates, divided with raster of thin and open junctions, are Meier’s hallmark on facades.

The new museum was situated in the historical center, precisely – in its northern part, in the Raval district, in the vicinity of the Plaza de Cataluña and the main promenade Las Ramblas.

The MACBA and public spaces located in its neighbourhood, such as Plaça dels Ángels in the south and a square in the north, have thus became one of the main cultural facilities parallel to the National Library of Catalonia, theaters, schools, university departments, the Casa Caridad Valencia and the Casa de la Misericordia cultural centers.

Gyurkovich emphasizes the synergy occurring as a result of the juxtaposition of modern objects with historic architecture, achieved by merging them together with a network of squares and streets, which seems to be momentous for the nature of the tourist district.

Richard Meier in the project of the museum and the square in front of it has above all stressed the contrast between modern and historical form that is established by this premise. According to his own words, he has created the museum for an art, which at the time of its design has not yet emerged15.

The MACBA is a very distinctive object, especially against the background of the historic buildings, and not without a reason, the edifice was hailed by the Spanish press as “the pearl of the Ravel district”16.

That is why its impact on the spatial structure of Barcelona can be compared with the one which the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao has. Its realization has led to a revival of public space, mainly due to the inclusion of the mentioned above square into the design of the building, the square is integral with it and generates activity in the whole area of the urban premise, not only in the interior itself. The appearance of large squares at the museums erected in Spain is indeed a very characteristic thing. Their presence has made the architectural structure of the building enter into a direct dialogue with the surrounding space, and to gain a more performative character. It should be even stated that precisely these squares, inner patios, and courtyards, in many cases are determining the nature of museum as the As cited in: R. Meier, El MACBA es un museo para El arte que aun no existe, [in:] ABC, April 27th 1995, p. 8-9.

16 As cited in: MACBA. El museu preu forma.

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The building of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA). Photo: Archives of MACBA

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symbolic architecture, whose iconic structure is perhaps unnoticeable and unreadable for the average visitor, but the very monumentality of premises, the volume and material used for the façade, speak in favour of it. In this manner, these museums acquire the image of the contemporary temples of art, which, although already have a completely secular dimension, are becoming at the same time the temples of popular culture. I do not think, however, that it is a negative sign “of our times”, but the need resulting from a change of attitude towards the art in general, which, since Marcel Duchamp challenged any institutionalism, has ceased to be a matter of elite. One can only ask the question, what resulted as an effect of Dadaists and Constructivists activities (El Lissitzky), who have experimented with the museal space. Actually, it should be made obvious that their efforts have contributed to a change in the ideological dimension of museum, but not to such extent that it would completely cease to exist, as André Malraux has postulated in his work The Imaginary Museum. Maria Rosas Layuno states that the MACBA is a transparent building17, for due to its simplicity it does not compete with the historic architecture of the Raval district, and at the same time, being an important cultural center, is an important step on the way to change the perspective in perceiving historical architecture.

This museum be, in this case, compared with the Centre Pompidou.

The construction is founded on a rectangular plan, which at the south side is adjoined by a sculpturally shaped form, on the north side the horizontal structure is interrupted and there is a part based on the circle shape, which is a kind of simplified rotunda. The edifice has four floors. The architecture created by Meier is founded on the assumptions of rationality, deriving its features from the modernist movement, especially Le Corbusier. Hence the compositional combination of straight lines and curves is serving to determine a relationship between the interior building space and the external light that enters inside through the gallery and large skylights. By the intention of the architect, light is a factor that integrates and defines the museal interior and reaches all its rooms.18 The body of this edifice is skillfully merged into the urban context of the square that is separated from the surrounding streets, the main tourist routes are, M. Layuno Rosas, op. cit., p. 273.

The element of composition, which was afterwards subjected to discussion and whose character has eventually been slightly changed after the building was commissioned for use. It should be stressed that natural light is not the best option for the exposition of certain works of art, because of that in some of the windows there have been employed special screens or mechanisms regulating the amount of light.

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with a network of buildings. However, at the same time it is a public space open to anyone who wants to relax in an environment with high aesthetic value. The focal point of building composition is the cylindrical part on the northern side of it, stressing the linear compilation of spaces inside. In this section, which is a paraphrase of classic rotunda, on the upper floors there are exhibition spaces, and the ground floor forms a part of the lobby. In the horizontal section, the main part of the construction body, on the four levels (one underground and three upper floors) are glazed exhibition spaces with a horizontal disposition that is additionally marked by a ramp – the structure dominating the character of the entrance hall, shaped like a minimalist sculpture.

From the west, there is additional part adjacent to the main construction body, complementing the main building structure. It is shaped on a rectangular plan where the eastern wall is slightly concave, the entrance to it is located on the eastern wall, in the space created between the two parts of this premise, which is also a part of the square. This adjoining building has seven floors and acts as the administrative and services facility – the offices, the library, and the documentation center are housed here.

There is a podium extending along the entire length of the edifice, a kind of ramp leading to the entrance of the museum, where its rhythm is then repeated in the interior ramp serving as stairs. The ground floor of the building comprises the entrance lobby, a serpentine form of the information sector is referring to a similar structure in the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art realized by Alvaro Siza.

The main facade, at the south side, is shaped asymmetrically; the presence of different materials (concrete and glass), and solids additively composed of flat, even plane of the main volume cuboid, are giving it the value of a sculpture. Particularly characteristic is the effect obtained by glazing virtually the whole facade, so that the interior with the concrete, white ramp connects directly to the space of square. So the museum is the implementation of open form architecture, the structure of which is indeed based on a solid tissue of facades and load-bearing walls, but at the same time, due to the use of glass, its form is undergoing a dematerialization process, and is completely integrated with the public space. In this respect, the architecture of MACBA meets the assumptions of performance, shaping the architectural landscape, but constituting an important element of social and cultural life of this district likewise. The presence of the glass screen on the facade additionally stresses the role of light appearing inside the building. The critics of Meier’s realization have repeatedly accused

as a coherent whole, because Meier wanted to avoid the traditional division into individual rooms, and create instead a space connected both to the outer square, and open in the inside. The main cohesive element here is the light, entering by a glass covering of facade and by numerous skylights and “gaps” in the walls. This style of using light occurs also in museums designed by Richard Meier in Frankfurt and Atlanta19.

The building of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA).

Photo: Archives of MACBA

him of disregarding the museology aspects, of paying homage to ideas detached from the building functions; after all, the natural light is not desirable in the museum buildings to such extent as planned by this architect. So later on there was a need to install special mechanism to regulate lighting.

The appearance of the facade reminds of the Neoplasticist trends, mainly by the presence of wavy lines of solids, making the puristic nature of the building structure somewhat organic, bringing it closer it to the accomplishments of Le Corbusier from 1950s, works of Aalto or Hans Arp’s sculptures.

The ostensible stability of building is enlivened by adhering and articulating its geometrical solids.

Therefore, it is only seemingly static, since the building is a very dynamic structure; the movement generated by the sculptural forms of concrete and glass is also highlighted by the warm Spanish sun, which is playing on the facade. It is worth to put an emphasis on the contraposition of materials used in the finishing of the building exterior and interior; outside the concrete facades are painted white or covered with white tiles, and in the inside there are noble materials used for lining the floor: black granite, Greek marble, and wood, contrasting with the white walls. When it comes to the interior of the museum it is to be noted that it is organized

The MACBA in Barcelona has the qualities of a sculpture-museum as well as museum-performance, though the latter characteristic seems to be overwhelming. It is the realization of museum establishment in the spirit of architecture created

by Richard Meier, regardless of the social landscape, also in other places of the world. Within the Plaça dels Ángels it is an object easily recognizable and distinctive, especially with its white facade standing out among other buildings. The body of this edifice is a compilation of simple forms and sculpturally shaped details, as well as architectural surprises as in the case of a double facade, which from the west smoothly flows from the glass “screen” into the concrete straight wall, which is in fact a kind of curtain covering, and partly revealing a more complex and fragmented structure, this wall is indeed something in the style of architectural joke, because it does not have any specific function, but instead gives the building a sculptural character.

The MACBA is also a museum serving as an important cultural center, which hosts not only the art exhibitions, but also the receptions and banquets. Meier has realized in his design the idea of a museum, which is responding to the needs of mass society. Above all, the square is designating the social role played by this institution. Just like in case of the square at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, also this one, located opposite to the museum in Barcelona as well, is a daily meeting place for people who just go through it, not necessarily taking part in the museal spectacle inside.

M. Layuno Rosas, op. cit., p. 280.

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DEFYING LOCATION Jerzy Olek

Most of the cultural differences that were once visible and easy to identify seem to have vanished these days. What was once an inherent idiosyncrasy of a specific culture is gradually vanishing. The constant and ultra-fast transfer of information is the biggest culprit, together with adopting solutions resulting from a multitude of dissimilar needs.

Messages often lose their original intentions when transferred to a different place – they become but an empty vessel, a pure form ready to be filled with any, often randomly selected, meaning. It is obvious in case of many exhibitions in which paintings and objects taken out of their original context have to fend with nothing more than just their physical form. Their mere morphology has to suffice as their native, codified messages, instantly understood at the place of their making, are no longer clear and legible in the new environment. International exhibitions often present a mishmash of works awkwardly clashed together into a cacophony of meanings expressed in different languages and, hence, offering little in terms of coherent message.

These were the thoughts that came into my mind during my visit to Palazzo Grassi in Venice. In its newly-renovated rooms, one could nearly hear Umberto Eco’s words taken from his seminal Open Work about contemporary artists often embracing concepts of formlessness, chaos, randomness and lack of definiteness. Eco penned these words around half a century ago, but the situation hasn’t changed much since. The concept of openness of each art work – which is something inherent – allows artists along with curators to combine all kinds of works into most unlikely arrangements. Such encounters often produce content that is complex and hard to decipher, however, one can always rely on a viewer’s good will and imagination to come up with some benign interpretation. The potential for readings is limitless as we all know too well.

Here I am, in Palazzo Grassi, built in 1748 as the splendid residence of the Bolognese family, which has been turned into something entirely different over the course of time. I am here to see the exhibition The Illusion of Light. In 1908, the mansion was acquired by the Swiss businessman Ernst Wullekopf, the same man who erected the colossal, overbearing mill in Gothic Revival style on Giudecca Island. Unfortunately (or was it?), 2 years later he was murdered by his very own employee and never got to do anything drastic with Palazzo Grassi.

The Fiat Consortium took over for a period of time and turned it into an art gallery organizing hugely popular exhibitions of ancient art. However, in 2004, Fiat’s flagging condition forced the company to sell. The property was acquired by the state, and

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Latifa Echakhch, “Á chaque stencil une revolution”, 2007. Photo: Jerzy Olek

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later purchased by the French billionaire François Pinault. His impressive collection counts nearly 2500 pieces of art and includes some seriously impressive names, like Picasso, Mondrian, Miró or Twombly.

It does, however, make a bow toward less refined tastes with some glitzy pop-artish works by Jeff Koons. It may well be yet another collection lacking a specified intellectual orientation.

Pinault assured his 80 percent stake in Palazzo Grassi by paying the city of Venice 30 million euros. His know-how is mostly provided by the board of expert advisers. After all, he is also a main shareholder in Christie’s. We can only assume that the Venetian Renaissance outfit of his palace caused some considerable doubts when considering the display of contemporary works of art. With such a grand and ornate interior as a background, would they manage to make their mark? Would they look and feel natural and at ease inside the building which, 300 years ago, had served such a completely different purpose? Will the newcomers manage to subdue those – foreign to their own reality – opulently decorated balustrades, staircases and ceilings?

The whole arrangement has to be stylistically coherent and contemporary designers know that much. Today’s minimalistic look won’t correspond

well with the overly ornamental ambience. So, what do they show? Light and absence of light, the icons of belated modernism and their imitations, clear messages and unconvincing ideas. The celebrated Monument for V. Tatlin by Dan Flavin, with its simple classical outline marked by fluorescent tubes, is well-known from a number of shows in New York, Paris and London… There are more flashing lines from Robert Irvine nearby, only his version can change the intensity as the stripes of light consist of 3 separate tubes, so they can light as three, two or just one. And that’s it, but possibly that’s plenty depending if one insists on adopting a metaphysical perspective. Roaming the palatial chambers I couldn’t shake off the feeling of déjà vu. I amused myself by guessing what the skilled conservators or brilliant forgers of old paintings would make of all those, often uncreative, repetitions. With their formidable skills, great attention to detail and professional insight, they must be extremely talented to imitate the old masters. Meanwhile, the imitation of primary geometrical shapes featuring in Stella’s paintings requires little mastery. Obviously, one can come up with an ideology and reasoning behind such art, it might well be convincing too: be it that today’s world is full of legitimate reproductions or even duplicates of reproductions, or that the progressing pauperization of art creates little demand for authenticity. Elaine Sturtevant has

Latifa Echakhch, “Á chaque stencil une revolution”, 2007. Photo: Jerzy Olek

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Nobuo Sekine, “Phase of Nothingness – Cloth and Stone”, 1970/2012. Photo: Jerzy Olek

devoted her life to reproducing modern art and thus putting a question mark on the whole concept of celebrating and pursuing original and authentic art.

Her talent as a reproducer of art was demonstrated in Palazzo Grassi in the form of her replica of Stella Die Fahne hoch! from 1990.

In the adjacent room, visitors encounter the work by the Moroccan artist Latifa Echakhch Á chaque stencil une revolution – the title she borrowed from Yasser Arafat’s speech, which means: For Each Stencil – a Revolution. The concept of this exhibition – as explained in the program – puts social and political issues in its scope. The visitors are encouraged to come up with their own interpretations and wild guesses of what they are seeing by removing the original context of the work, where dark blue walls are laced with trickles of paint dripping down to the floor. It clearly reverberates with Eco’s words about interpretations formed by the minds opened to each and every possibility. I had a chance to see similarly painted walls in the Metropolitan Museum in Tokyo, during Takashi Ishida’s exhibition. The show was supposed to present the “making of” his Sea Movie – a great piece with various references, where the most significant layer was the one about the cinematic experience itself paired with the original way of projecting the movie.

Apart from Palazzo Grassi, Pinault is also in possession of Punta della Dogana, a former customs office erected at the end of the 17th century at Dorsoduro, planned out with an isosceles triangle at its base with the sides measuring 105, 105 and 75 metres. This place, with its austere interior, makes a far better background for art shows. Nothing dominates nor competes with the exhibits. The famous Japanese architect Tado Ando (Church of the Light on the fringes of Osaka) was commissioned to adapt it for art display purposes. Ando has interrupted the monotony of old crumbling brick walls with perfectly smooth concrete slabs. The result is stunning simplicity – a wonderful background for nearly every object presented at the Prima materia exhibition.

The eponymous materia is sparsely distributed throughout the building. Usually, a single item is assigned to any given room, with the latter boasting vast walls and floors, and the subtle emanation of these works remains unscathed as there is nothing threatening or obtrusive in their surroundings. Minimalism, arte povera and mono-ha are among the leading trends. In some cases even there is the undertone of Zen uttered with typically subversive rhetoric that instigates divorce from anything that suggests mimicry or deception. This particular detachment with a tinge

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Kishio Suga, “Gap of the Entrance to the Space”, 1979/2012. Photo: Jerzy Olek

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Fragment of the exposition, on the left: Lee Ufan, “Relatum”, 1972/1977. Photo: Jerzy Olek

of irony and delicate provocation becomes a great advantage of those presentations.

Investigating associations between members of arte povera and another, similar movement that emerged in Japan called mono-ha (largely inspired by minimal, conceptual and land art) is particularly interesting. In the Far East “poor art” was comprehended slightly differently than in Europe, it was mostly based on natural, universally accessible materials like dirt, stone or wood. It was initiated in 1968 when Nobuo Sekine arranged his “wild” installation titled Phase Mother Earth. It was a cylinder 220 cm high and made of earth; it was stood next to a hole of the same shape: positive and negative of the same object, like a cast and a mould used to obtain it. At Prima materia Sekine showed his Phase of Nothingness – Cloth and Stone.

The white canvas of the painting is circularly creased in the middle, hiding a stone underneath its surface, while another stone, also tightly covered in white canvas, is tied to it by a rope and hangs down to the floor. His other work displayed nearby is called Phase of Nothingness – Water. It comprises a metal cylinder and a cube, both painted with black lacquer, both filled with water. They hold the same volume of liquid, demonstrating a sense of resemblance and balance, while forms find continuity in one another.

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Another member of this group, Kishio Suga, developed an elaborate installation Gap of the Entrance to the Space, drawing a certain analogy to Sekine, by using opposing forms of sorts. On a tin sheet he has placed numerous cubical forms made of the same material and positioned them inside the cut-out shapes that correspond directly with the shapes of their bases. The space around the cuboids is strewn with rocks. Is Suga trying to make a metaphorical reference to the traditional Japanese stone gardens? It’s a risky notion for the fear of simplifying his work, yet could it be connected to the fact that Japanese art has been worshipping stone since time immemorial and even modern art cannot progress without honouring it? Another member of mono-ha only reaffirms such a theory.

Lee Uffan, in his persistent search for equilibrium in the material world, has displayed a massive rock laid on the top of shattered glass, as if it was dropped there with force, destroying it as a result.

Italians don’t stay far behind when it comes to such “poor”, austere means highlighting the demand for more accessible and democratized sculptures attained with simple materials of everyday use.

However, they occasionally employ an element of the unknown. Michelangelo Pistoletto constructed his Metrocubo d’Infinito (Cubic Meter of Infinity) using six square mirrors assembled together to make

a cube. Its opposing walls mutually reflect their surfaces, inspiring fantasies and speculations about the interior full of infinite mutual reflections of the opposite surfaces. The visitors can only summon their own imagination to produce such an image, not being able to enter the cube themselves.

right. Then it is non-gray we must forget about when viewing this painting”. Short contradicting instructions in two opposite corners brace the composition together, they say: “forget about gray” and “forget about non-gray”. It’s a paradox that can be chanted like a Zen koan.

Bringing together works by American, European and Japanese artists and showing them under one roof enables us to fully appreciate cultural diversity, but most of all it makes it easy to realize how often those inspirations intertwine. Observing and imitating others has become something customary, something artists do all the time. We can only hope the meaning of the symbol reinterpreted is not misunderstood. There is a dose of philosophical subversiveness in Arakawa’s attitude. This artist demonstrates much kinship to Neo dada, his art is admittedly governed by the attempt to avoid the passing of time and ageing. Being an architect, he designs utopian cities where such a feat could allegedly become possible. He is equally droll when it comes to visual arts. He declares reality as deceptive, hence in his mind seeing things with one’s eyes might not be a totally reliable way of getting to know them. His input to the exhibition is the painting from 1970 titled Courbet’s Canvas.

The surface is filled with multi-coloured stencilled text: “We are told we should forget about gray. All

Provocation and nostalgia are reoccurring topics, there is a pronounced melancholic longing for the same powerful expressiveness of modern artists who broke the mould a hundred years ago. We realize that when we come across the painting titled All Day I Stare At the Cross of Malevich and Wish I were a Painter. Theaster Gates made it two years ago along with Roof for 2½ Tatami (Slightly Covered) – the latter refers to something entirely different. Today the nods of appreciation are being given out in many a different direction but the material is, in this case, exclusively American. Gates uses painted fire hoses in place of canvas.

The title of the exhibition in Punta della Dogana points us toward alchemy and the fabled primary matter that constitutes our entire physical world, and which was supposed to be the ingredient of the philosopher’s stone. The curators, however, decided to surpass the most basic and traditional elements and, apart from earth, air, fire and water, they allowed the use of stone, wood, canvas, glass and

Michelangelo Pistoletto. “Metrocubo d’ infinito”, 1965-1966. Photograph and its fragment by Jerzy Olek

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Palazzo Grassi, © Palazzo Grassi, ORCH orsenigo_chemollo

metal. The question that springs to mind is what metaphysical significance do those materials emit after they were skilfully processed by the artists?

What mystery do they conceal, if any? Could they be the individual reaction to chaos? If so, which chaos are we talking about? The primordial meta-chaos that emerged from magma? Or is this the acutely real chaos of our modern day existence? Are these works in any way efficient? Since they could just as well become the means intensifying the whole sensation.

they complete or rule each other out. There is a voice referring to the shaky theory of black matter, someone else is flirting with Tao. You can see artists who try to use the works of their predecessors to validate their own accomplishments, and others who start afresh. There are those who perceive the current circumstances, favourably calling them the times of global pluralism, while their antagonists speak of visual and intellectual chaos. There is no doubt that the Punta della Dogana exhibition offers respite for sore eyes, soothing minds and that doesn’t happen every day. It also recommends the attitude where the conceptual value and elaborate creative process surpasses the value of an object itself, particularly when it comes to such splendid refinement of form and narration.

The numerous threads of potential interpretations interweave and become knotted, occasionally

Punta della Dogana, © Matteo De Fina

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Theaster Gates, “Roof for 2½ Tatami (Slightly Covered)”, 2012. Photo: Jerzy Olek

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DEPRIVATION OF ART’S SANCTITY Roman Kubicki

The German aesthete and art philosopher Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder was destined to die young.

He was born in 1773 and passed away twenty years later. Nevertheless, he managed to publish a few essays on art, and his thoughts continue to inspire to this day. His writings might seem highly exalted when he ascertains that art is to be called a flower of human emotion. This gracious if not slightly pretentious metaphor strikes one with its ambiguity.

To compare art to a flower of human emotion could be praise, or perhaps an accusation? The beauty of flowers is predestined by the transitional. A flower itself is not yet a life but its presage. Only cacti are alive and well in any conditions at all times.

However it’s unlikely that anyone would ever feel urged to describe art as a cactus of human emotion.

The following notions of Wackenroder shed more light on this issue.

We find out that “… in every single work of art wherever in this world our Almighty Father recognizes the touch of his divine spark that from him went through the heart of a man and permeated all his mortal creations” it’s anything if not distinguishing and ennobling for the work of art. It does not only bind a man to his God but the God to a man. When the Maker’s point of perception shifts from the religious to the aesthetic one, the former loses its supremacy: “He finds a Gothic cathedral pleases his eyes as much as the Greek temple, the battle screams of barbaric savages ring with the same pleasant tones as the churchly choirs”. The impact of such a notion has a remarkable force to it and it surely could be destructible to the Christian values

Roman Kubicki, exhibition in Galeria Szyperska, 2013. Photo: Jacek Kasprzycki

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trying to assume powers that were strictly in the hands of the high priests, the powers to determine authorized boundaries for the people to contact their God. If God is equally pleased with a Gothic church and an ancient Greek temple it would be hard to expect Him to favour devotions coming from one over another. A man puts an aesthetic experience over a religious one. Whereas the temple is only true when it pleases God with its beauty, the only prayer that God lends ear to is the prayer that pleases Him and it may only please God with its beauty.

At the time Wackenroder was writing this, art enthusiasts were more likely to find the objects of their admiration inside galleries and museums.

The great masterpieces were no longer exclusively parts of the altars; they were gradually distancing themselves from the hitherto lifespan of selfadmiration in the shadow of the mighty altar. The multitude of art galleries and museums that started sprouting up in the second half of the 18th century were proof of art’s growing independence and autonomy. However, another problem emerged and Wackenroder swiftly rang the alarm bells – it’s the moral degradation of art that is slowly taking over.

“Picture galleries are commonly regarded as fairs at which we can judge, praise or condemn new wares in passing”.

Art that fled the oppression of religious commands became hostage to the whims of the so-called free market. In a world dominated by the economy there is little room left for economically unviable entities and so the temples of art become commercialized temples of art. The reality Wackenroder dreamt of was somewhat different: “… while they ought to be temples where, in serene and self-effacing silence and in solitary exaltation, we may admire the great artists, those most sublime of mortals, and warm ourselves in the sunshine of rapturous thoughts and sentiments in prolonged and tranquil contemplation of their works.”

Thus the artist fills the role of the high priest. Now it’s him who guides people toward the Absolute.

“The appreciation of sublime artworks is akin to prayer” – he declares and ushers us to behave respectfully in the museums: “It is nothing short of blasphemy for a man to reel away from the ringing laughter of his friends in a worldly hour so that he may talk for a few minutes with God in a nearby church out of mere habit. It is no less blasphemous in such an hour to cross the threshold of the building where in silent testimony to the dignity of the human race are preserved for eternity the most admirable creations which the hand of man has wrought.”

Only those who appreciate the significance of an art gallery or a museum should be allowed to enter such a place: “Wait, as you would do in praying, for those moments of bliss when divine grace illumines your soul with a nobler revelation, for only then will your soul merge into one with the works of the artists.” Truly great

Roman Kubicki, 48th Venice Biennale, 1999. Photo: Paweł Łubowski

art exceeds life: “Artworks are by their very nature as little part of the common flow of life as is the thought of God.” A man who wants to fully experience a work of art must make necessary preparations: “They (works of art) transcend what is ordinary and commonplace, and we must have a calm mind which expresses itself not in loud exclamations or in the clapping of hands, but solely through inner excitation.” Wackenroder reveals how strongly art affects his emotions when he visits an art museum: “It is a holy day of celebration for me when, earnest and composed, I go to look at sublime artworks.” Art is a supreme form of human spirituality and the modern artist is simply a successor of a medieval knight and a saint: “The most important thing is that in our arrogance we should not raise ourselves above the spirit of sublime artists and presume to pass judgement on them. This is a foolish manifestation of man’s vanity and pride. Art is above man, and we can only admire and revere the splendid works of its votaries and open up our hearts to them so that all our feelings may be dissolved and purified.”1 Which works of art deserved Wackenroder’s highest praise? Whose art was he worshipping? Convinced that all great things had already happened in the past, he was quite disapproving toward most of his contemporaries: “A woe to our age for manipulating art and turning it into sensual frivolity as it is, in fact, a solemn feat. What has happened to a man that he deserves no respect and artists do neglect him, as if more thrilled by pretty, bright colours and trickery of light and shadow?”2 If he lived today would he gladly come and visit the galleries and museums of our times, where he would be confronted not only by sensual frivolities but also by frivolous thoughts?

1 The Wackenroder quotes taken from the facsimile http://web. sbu.edu/theology/bychkov/Wackenroder.pdf 2 Ibidem.

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For it seems that the masterpiece of our time is far from being a whole and sovereign entity, more than that – it struggles to summon enough artistic and aesthetic impact to pass itself as such. A singular work is increasingly mute and invisible and if it isn’t homeless it’s only because it’s hardly even there, and if it is there the problem of homelessness is topped by acute loneliness. The idea of a home is that it’s there to protect its inhabitants from the hostile scrutiny of the outside world, but this is only the case when such privacy is under threat. Alas, the homes of art are visited with waning frequency and enthusiasm; rarely do we anticipate with excitement another artistic arrival. Today the cathedrals, museums and galleries are no longer places of worship. A single work of art would struggle and fail to stand up to the greedy and commercialized culture of our times. No-one to celebrate its delivery to this world and no-one to mourn at its funeral. Its appearance or disappearance – either way – goes equally unnoticed. Well... that is unless someone has just bought it for millions of pounds.

Ever since the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, and the empty place where once the famous portrait hung got more attention than the painting itself, we are aware that nothing boosts the reputation of a work of art as much as its destruction or vilification. It was convicted and left with nothing but its anonymous and forlorn courage merely representing the self-imposed dignity of non-existence. At first, we could observe a gradual decline of great works in the symbolic culture, which meant their absence surpassed their presence. This was happening increasingly more often as the potential audience was confronted with the representation of the masterpiece, meaning: reproduction of the original work of art.

The uniqueness of the encounter, which could only be compared to the excitement of the wedding night when only the chosen ones could see and touch the creation, was lost and replaced by vulgar reminiscence of copious and random acquaintances with the numerous reproductions. Even the precious works of art, the ones that made history and graced the art history encyclopaedias were subjected to endless scientific analyses and critical evaluations, whilst the burden of evoking all the emotions that are anticipated on the way of direct, sensual contact with the original was shifted onto the worthless reproductions. The greatest masterpieces would only be granted some tepid and affected admiration for their artistic and aesthetic corporeality. The public sets off to meet what they already know – as any mystery or intimacy that was once present between the work of art and its recipient has been long stripped away by the boundless and unrelenting

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tacky favours of its countless reproductions.

According to the Copernicus-Gresham Law, those “bad”, meaning: cheap and egalitarian, reproductions drive out “good” – expensive and exclusive originals.

In the age of paper money, where nobody really remembers what a bar of gold feels like, the sensual and direct contact with a masterpiece becomes increasingly difficult, hence sporadic. It’s been recently perceived as something outdated or even aesthetically offensive. The grand works of art in particular are not homeless. However, they are no longer celebrated by senses, revisited nor showered with interpretations since their potential suitors, admirers and connoisseurs have already managed to find aesthetic and intellectual fulfilment in the embraces of yet another ensuing reproduction.

In particular, the contemporary work of art is deprived of any intimate areas. It appears that everything strives to be intimate and therefore nothing remains so. When we speak of any other intimacy, we know that it exists and we are not only able to see it, but we can also hear it, comment on it, examine it, we approve it or disapprove it.

Today’s lack of intimacy in relation to the work of art is a result of deconstruction of the latter, caused by blunt rejection of shame and guilt. Today’s art quite comfortably steps into the role of a courtesan but let’s not be fooled by its cheer. Masterpieces were always present throughout the history of art.

As places of worship of a kind, they were seen as both the “lungs” and the source of “oxygen” for all artistic creations. In the times of ubiquitous and mighty replicas, the original – similar to God – is imperceptible by senses and coldly absent.

Metaphorically speaking, the realm of art switches to the “anaerobic respiration”, bypassing the traditional terms and principles of aesthetics. There is nothing but works of art and yet none are there!

When speaking of art from the collective, societal point of view, it’s the absence of it that appears more real and palpable than its existence. First we’ve grown numb to the existing masterpieces, now we go unbaffled by their sheer absence. This way we’ve learnt that this world of artistic creations can thrive short of a mystical aura hitherto exuded by works of art. From the societal point of view, producing them is no longer necessary. This pending doom of an extrasensory work of art is becoming all too similar to the doom of an extrasensory God. The gradual diminishing of God’s presence doesn’t at all affect the number of churches or intensification of religious interests. It seems that works of art are no longer needed by even the keenest of art lovers (although they remain essential for those who hope to turn them into some sort of financial profit), and least by the art itself.

Today’s work of art (commonly referred to as an object, installation, situation, document, footage, trace, reminiscence, sometimes even – a painting, print work or a sculpture, but under no circumstances is it to be called a work of art) establishes its own ontological identity on the same premises that determine its evanescence, randomness and fortuity. Clearly there are no more grand masterpieces that were bound to be created in order to yet again demonstrate the forever ordinary reason behind our forever extraordinary lives. The masterpieces of our times are incessantly rushing to meet their death, and if such a work is somehow lucky this death has already been pronounced and meticulously documented. The less fortunate creations are not even in for a funeral. As in life, so in death! Paradoxically, the more excitement or elaborate reflections that surround the spectacular international art events: the oversized festivals, biennales, shows, meetings and fairs, the less thrills and anticipation aroused by the art involved in those celebrations. Even though they are purportedly playing leading roles, it is only on occasions that they manage to remain in the spotlight and in the front row. The lead role is normally taken by the directors and curators armed with the pre-arranged slogans headlining those glamorous events where masses can meet masterpieces. The sheer number of accumulated works is often a cause for ostensible and hasty encounters. The works of art are no longer bricks constituting a temple of art; now they are mere sand grains in the desert that art has become, and as such they expose the fragility of pretences and claims we make when trying to possess the supernatural ability of portraying and multiplying the world around us. Singular works of art do not offer anything and want nothing; they are not even in a position to flog their own homelessness. They do not meet any reasonable standards and even though they still exist, they are nowhere to be seen.

They remind us we are only strong when we come to terms with our weaknesses. As the brilliant Jerzy Ludwiński3 once wrote: “On the preview night, the interest aroused by art is at its peak when the paintings disappear behind the dense crowd”. All those years back, Wilhelm Wackenroder hailed them as fractions of living sanctity, but today for works of art, absence has become the only justified form of existence. And to think it wasn’t that long ago when they were flocking across our vigilant eyes…!

Jerzy Ludwiński, Góra. Konspekt wykładu wygłoszonego w Poznaniu, 1982, found in: Sztuka w epoce postartystycznej i inne teksty, edited and selected by Jarosław Kozłowski, Academy of Fine Art in Poznan and Biuro Wystaw Artystycznych in Wroclaw 2009, p. 158.

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CENTRO DE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO DE HUARTE (CACH) Interview with Javier Manzanos Garayoa, the director of CACH Paweł Łubowski

Paweł Łubowski: How was Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Huarte established? The town, where it is situated, is small. How the location of this institution was decided? Decision-makers of this venture must have been very brave.

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: In April 2005, the townhall of Huarte, a village located five kilometers away from Pamplona´s center town, which is the capital of the Navarra region, established a Huarte Foundation Centre of Contemporary Art (Fundación Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Huarte).

In June 29th 2006, the first stone was layed for this unique space, devoted specifically to contemporary art and culture, with the main aim to become a referential centre for contemporary creation in this region of Northern Spain. The Centre opened to the public on the 26th of October 2007.

Among the reasons that motivated Huarte town hall to embark on this adventure, I would stress out the rapid urban growth (not only due to the building of new housing units, but also because of the creation of a great commercial and leisure centre and also the development of industrial estates), resulting in a demographic expansion of the village (which from 3,115 inhabitants in 2001, increased up to 6,781 inhabitants in 2013). In addition to that, there was a clear determination and political willingness to create a space devoted to contemporary art in Navarra, territory of 650,000 inhabitants, without such an institution conceived for that purpose at that time.

Paweł Łubowski: Who is in charge of the Centre? Is it the local government?

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: The management of the Centre was developed by the local government and

by Huarte town hall, through the creation of the Huarte Foundation Centre of Contemporary Art between

Carlos Garaicoa, Lynne Cohen, exhibition view, CACH. Photo: Archives of CACH

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The building of Centro de Arte Contemporรกneo de Huarte (CACH). Photo: Archives of CACH

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Faรงade of Centro de Arte Contemporรกneo de Huarte (CACH). Photo: Archives of CACH

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April 2005 and December 2009. During that year and due to the impossibility of mantaining the activities of the Centre with the local authorities budget, an agreement with the Goverment of Navarra was signed, stating that the Government of Navarra would be responsible for providing economic funding in order to assure the development of CACH’s functions.

From January 2010, the Patronate that leads Huarte Foundation Centre of Contemporary Art, consists of eight patrons designated by the Cultural Department of the Navarra Government, and of one patron designated by Huarte town hall.

Paweł Łubowski: What characterizes the architectural concept of Huarte´s building? In what way were the functions of building space performed?

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: The building was designed and constructed (started in July 2005 and finished in April 2007) by the architects Franc Fernández, Carles Puig and Xavier Vancells. The architects did come up with an architectural strategy that generated exhibition spaces and activities around the core of the exhibitions programming, understanding that what was important for the Centre was its activity, rather than the content.

The building, in a cubic form, is defined not just by the content displayed in its interior, but also by the dynamic activities that take place in its vicinity: open-air film projections, scenic and musical events, artistic interventions in the exterior – enhancing in this way an interaction between the Art Centre, the village of Huarte, and the natural environment.

The building was designed as a space for cultural activities and exhibitions, which can be extended, modified or constantly redistributed.

It consists of four exhibition floors and an underground floor (including a partially roofed parking), 6,500 m2 in total, out of them 2,300 m2 are devoted to four exhibition spaces and it also includes an auditorium that can hold up to 220 people.

The ground floor is structured around a front of house reception, which connects the auditorium with the coffee shop and restaurant, and also provides access to the higher levels. The offices are also located in the ground floor.

The exhibition spaces, which are distributed on the three top floors, constitute a neutral and clear space, which can be adapted according to the requests of each exhibition.

The exhibition rooms can be adjusted with movable walls depending of the needs of the displays, creating spaces for audiovisual projections or working spaces. Hid behind the perypherical walls

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within the exhibition spaces, there is a meter wide hallway that holds installations for air-conditioning and electricity.

Paweł Łubowski: What are the departments and how many people are working there?

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: The working areas in Huarte Foundation Centre of Contemporary Art are structured on three levels: Internal Area – Management Public Area – Services – Education and Cultural Activities Department – Activities External Area – Press and communication These working areas are carried out by three members of staff: Director, Coordinator of Activities and Head of Administration To ensure the functioning of these areas we also collaborate with other individuals and external companies, which cover the following fields: Press and communication (one person), Documentation (one person), Social networking and participation (one person), a team of Educators (five educators), a team of Art Handling (four art handlers), Attendants and Cleaners (six persons), Administrative Consultants, Maintenance Company, Security Company, and also students on internships (we host between three to five students each year).

Paweł Łubowski: Does the Centre possess its collection of works? If not – why?

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: Huarte’s Contemporary Art Centre does not possess an art collection.

There are various contemporary art collections in Pamplona, both private and public, which liberates us from functioning as a museum.

What could be viewed as a great disadvantage to our work, turns out to become a great opportunity.

On one hand, it gives us the freedom, which is always desirable, to be able to work (temporarily) with specific artworks, and only with those, that seem valuable for the curatorial discourse, without establishing a, sometimes suffocating, long term relation.

On the other hand, it sets us free from a good amount of economic, human and other spatial resources (related to conservation, restoration or registration needs, qualified personnel to perform these functions and also a suitable storage). Instead of allocating these resources to objects, we can directly assign them to what it really interests us: to people who may visit the Centre in order to experience something, learn or explore their own expressive capabilities in terms of contemporary art.

The absence of a collection allows us to be what

we want: a very active, dynamic, interdisciplinary Centre, not a Museum. We organize temporary exhibitions, we like touring exhibitions, accompanied by multiple activities that are aimed to a great variety of visitors, with the purpose that they repeatedly make their way to Huarte to attend to new proposals.

Paweł Łubowski: Who are the people visiting your Centre? How is attendance? I suppose that most of visitors are not from Huarte?

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: Our public is very diverse and we constantly work to make sure that they find our proposals interesting enough to visit us. We have a very clear educative vocation, and we carry out an important campaign for schools, performed throughout a whole course, in which up to 5,000 students attend during a year, ranging from children to university students.

On an annual basis we receive around 21,000 visitors, whose profile is that of generally young or middle aged individuals. However we also offer specifically designed proposals, with the aim of targeting audiences, such as groups in risk of social exclusion, handicapped individuals or senior communities.

We are especially proud to transform our visitors from mere spectators into active users, since about 70% of the people visiting the Centre do also participate in activities. When it comes to their provenience, the majority are from Pamplona and its neighbourhood (58%), but with an important participation of Huarte (14%), the rest coming from Navarra (10%), visitors from other parts of Spain (9%) and also from abroad (9%). On top of that, we have a fidelized audience of virtual visitors via Internet (with around 5,500 followers on Facebook).

Paweł Łubowski: Does location in that particular region of Spain influence your programme?

Everything in the Centre is labelled in two languages. Did any politically implied meanings, connected to the history of place where the Centre was built, exist? Does the history of this place and politics influence your programme?

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: The maxim coined by René Dubos in 1972 saying: “Think globally, act locally” expresses the paradox of contemporary culture. It is the subject of a debate on the duality between the universal and the particular. Internet is the paradigm of this difficult coexistence, in which the global village is equipped with information without limits, and peopled by countless small communities, united by a common interest.

The activities of CACH need to show the necessary ability to navigate between the two currents, seemingly antagonistic: CACH cannot be solely a recipient of universal information, expressions and cognition, but has to be capable of converting itself into an emissary of particularities, acquiring its own “ways” of being and of interpreting the world. It has to generate its own critical thought that would be capable of overcoming the alienating quality of singular thought.

The term “glocality” tells us of this possible, necessary, and enriching coexistence and complementary being of contraries – the global is formed by the diversity and multiplicity of the local, the sum of all particularities.

Our program intends to influence the global by the local. Our attention is thus on strengthening the local artistic networking, creating relationships with the society in which we are placed, yet keeping in sight international references and connections. This is the only way in which we can aspire to reach a global dimension.

We can’t leave behind the dimensions of our reality that are historical, political and social, but our programme also needs to mirror universal human interests, needs to generate proposals serving our own understanding, a better understanding of the world in which we live and, above all, to try to influence the construction of a better future. I believe that these are some of the most valuable aims that contemporary art can bring to our society, all from an independent and critical point of view.

In opposition to the identical, franchised artistic centres, I search for singularity and for a definition of a genuine project, belonging to the inhabitants and visitors of a specific place: Huarte, Navarra. In contrast to a museum with a national identity of a people, I look for a hybrid Centre, contaminated with different races, languages and beliefs.

Confronted with the homogenization of tastes and opinions, I seek out to experiment with new flavours and to refute arguments. I propose to contemplate the global view from the point of the local, of the quotidian, of the difference. I’m after a Centre that would teach us to know and appreciate the backstreets of our neighbourhood, the roads that connect our territories, but that also provide us access to the highways of global information.

Paweł Łubowski: Do any Basque separatist movements influence current art?

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: Althought there are artists working on Basque identity, using it to situate themselves in the world through the optic of nationalism – the Basque separatists’ movements have not shown an interest in using contemporary

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The building of Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Huarte (CACH). Photo: Archives of CACH

artworks to support their cause, probably because they find better expression in traditional culture.

Paweł Łubowski: How are the persons responsible for such institutions as centres and museums of contemporary art appointed? How did you become the director of this institution? What kind of programme did you prepare for this position?

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: I was appointed the Director on the 2nd of May 2011, having gone through a process that the Patronate of Huarte’s Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art had started in November 2010. It was at that time that the public announcement was approved, together with the guidelines for appointing the Director, based on the commitment to ascribe to the Code of Ethics (or a document stating good practices) for museums and contemporary art centres, compiled by the main professional associations in this sector and approved by the Ministry of Culture in the Spanish Government.

The process evaluated professional experience of candidates and a strategic programme for the centre. Twenty two proposals had been received, both national and international. After the first selection phase, based on the CV’s and projects presented, followed a personal interview in which we had to defend the projects. Out of the five final candidates, I was appointed by the members

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of the Patronate and was offered a contract for the duration of five years, with the possibility of prolonging it for another five years.

For the rest of the team of the Centre: coordination and administration, we decided to collaborate with the Foundation Employment Society from the Public University of Navarra (la Fundación Empresa Sociedad de la Universidad Pública de Navarra), which started the selection process at the national level in many stages, in order to cover the required profiles. In both cases around 200 candidates applied.

The project of directing, for which I was appointed, and which I am currently executing, is contained in an extensive document in which I explain the conceptual, contextual and ideological dimensions of the Centre, along with the objectives and values that should characterize it, the vision and goals that I propose, followed by detailed working areas that need to be developed, their characteristics and criteria for implementation, programming and evaluation, all of which I have set out to perform in these first five years.

Paweł Łubowski: Poland and Spain are equally Catholic countries. In Poland there are often interventions by communities connected with Church into contemporary art. What is the situation in Spain? What influence has Church on contemporary art?

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: Spain is a country based on a Catholic tradition and culture, however it is a secular state which guarantees, as stated in its Constitution, ideological and religious freedom for individuals and communities.

The phenomenon that you told me is taking place in Poland, practically does not occur in Spain. The activity of the Church, apart from their pastoral work, concentrates on the fields of education, assistance or social work, and they show no signs of concern or interest in intervening with manifestations of contemporary art. In fact, the majority of artistic manifestations promoted by the Church, with few exceptions, generally represent traditional art, and these manifestations are very far from contemporary art proposals. So I would say that the influence of the Church on the contemporary art scene is practically inexistent.

Paweł Łubowski: Do provocations on part of artists, regarding religion, politics, morality, happen? What is a reaction of art receivers and what that of institutions?

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: Provocation has always been one of the possible ways of communication that artists establish with their public. To cite just a few examples of the works that caused a great scandal in their time, but which today are considered great artworks of art history, I would recall the operation of covering the genitals of saints made by Michael Angelo for the Sixtine Chapel, a decision of the Council of Trent; the frightening Death of the Virgin, not an Ascension, painted by Caravaggio, who took for a model a woman drown in Tiber; the women in the dressing room scenes by Degas; the seminude Taithan women of Gauguin; the explicit Origin of the World by Coubert; or the provocative readymades of Duchamp... and so on until this very day.

An artist may recall sublime emotions or may incite an absolute repulsion, but essentially he has to make us think and has to do it through his art. It is understandable that spectators who see their ideas, morals or beliefs questioned do react angrily... but these reactions may be as many and as different as the viewers themselves, which is why it is fundamental to maintain an ideological policy of respect for human rights.

The institution needs to prioritize, as in all its programming policy, the artistic quality of artworks which it displays. An art centre has to provide artistic proposals and distance itself from disrespectful provocation and gratuitous personal offence. When a provocative work of art is no longer the means for denunciation, raising conscience, or for prompting viewers to reflect – but becomes a

provocation for its own sake, it may unfortunately lead to a crave for ephemeral fame of mediocre artists who, with these types of “scandalous” works, try to achieve a quick impact on media.

By definition, a provocation made to the public by a centre is only justified by the artistic value of the piece and by the value of social awareness which it may bring. Personally, I distance myself from artworks devoid of quality, which are aimed at frivolous and gratuitous offense to the visitors of the exhibition.

Paweł Łubowski: How does economic crisis influence art institutions? Are the effects of crisis noticeable in contemporary art?

Javier Manzanos Garayoa: The economic crisis seriously affects contemporary art institutions in Spain. The consequences of the crisis are very negative and will be very difficult to alleviate in the long run.

In our region, Navarra, contemporary art has never had much economic significance, which forced us to frequently work facing small budgets and precariousness. No doubt that what is the worst in this crisis is that it had evolved bit by bit throughout the first decade of the XXI century, resulting in tough policy of economic cuts in public administration that focused generally on culture, and especially on contemporary art. This has led to the disappearance of certain artistic structures that had taken many years to consolidate.

In our particular case, the economic cuts have been significant and have influenced our programme, especially in an international dimension. Between the year 2011 and 2014 public funds from Navarra Government to support CACH were reduced by 37,5%. Nowadays, Huarte’s Contemporary Art Centre has at its disposal 70% less resources that what it had when it was first launched in 2007.

This critical, even dramatic, situation has brought some positive effects that I would like to point out.

The crisis, an ecosystem inherent to contemporary art, also brings in a necessity of change and an opportunity for innovation. On one hand, it has forced us to rewrite our programme, rethink what we are doing, why we are doing it and, above all, for whom we are doing it, and at what price. On the other hand, it has equipped us with new, very enriching ways of working in a collaborative manner as a network, not only with other institutions, but also with artistic agents themselves, as well as with the existent and potential audience. And it finally has forced us to value more seriously the efficiency and public use of our cultural institutions. We have also explored new forms of funding, both from private donors and citizens, such as crowfunding.

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ART IN A HARBOUR Agnieszka Rayzacher

In June 2012 I curated an exhibition called I Have a Dream in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Wrocław. The urgency and vitality of the pending change was the leitmotiv of the show and it soon turned out to be quite a relevant and important message for the times of the economic crisis. It also caught the attention of the curators at the Contemporary Art Centre (CACT) in Thessaloniki, resulting in them inviting me to take the exhibition to their venue.

It was a thrilling perspective to take an exhibition which was arranged with a particular institution in mind, which – much like CACT itself – is located inside an existing building after a total makeover in order to serve as an art venue. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Wrocław was opened in autumn 2011 in what was previously a WWII bunker.

The history of CACT is not quite as turbulent. It used to be a harbour warehouse. In 2001, as a result of co-operation and an agreement between the Ministry of Culture and the Maritime Transport Department of Greece, the warehouse known as B1 was assigned to the Museum of Contemporary Art to use as they wish. And so it was subsequently converted into the Contemporary Art Centre Thessaloniki. It is located in the northern part of the

CACT façade. Photo: Archives of Agnieszka Rayzacher

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Józef Robakowski, “From My Window 1978-2000”, photo. from the exhibition “I Have a Dream”. Photo: Archives of Agnieszka Rayzacher

harbour, recently dubbed the “harbour of culture” as the Museum of Photography has also opened its headquarters nearby.

Thessaloniki is a fairly small city. Most landmarks and places of historical or cultural importance can be seen during a brief walk in one go, which is probably why the harbour location doesn’t seem like an isolated and distant spot. It’s a short walk to the sea shore, whilst going in the opposite direction leads to Ladalica – an old town with its well preserved small houses, giving the impression of an open-air folk museum, but with plenty of restaurants and eateries to choose from.

The industrial wharves and warehouses converted into art museums have one common feature – they seem very austere. The architecture gives in to a utilitarian role, becoming utterly minimalistic, which often allows for any symbolic messages or interpretations imposed by the new role. Outside, there is little that tells the tale of the art institution hidden inside, only a handful of posters and banners advertising the exhibitions. The whole building seems sombre and uninviting, which poses quite a challenge for the management to turn it into an advantage.

To have the entire Contemporary Art Centre at my disposal was quite an experience. I was quickly to find out that such a peculiar and vast (stretching over 700 sq. metres) space was ideal for a largescale, collective exhibition. The building’s plan fits inside a rectangle that comes close to a square.

The ground level covers the exhibition area but also a reception desk, a small book store and some utility rooms. The exhibition space resembles an indoor patio surrounded with “arches”. This type of set-up calls for one, perhaps two or three, centrally organized works surrounded by others which may only be viewed in a more linear manner. This is where one can appreciate the similarity to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Wrocław. Upstairs, apart from the administrative rooms, there is more viewing space with the mezzanine that runs around the downstairs patio with the traditional oldfashioned roof beams standing out from the rest due to the dark wood stain.

Altogether CACT gives the impression of an open space type of venue; paradoxically it’s the very openness that restrains the vastness. Surprisingly, it’s a great place for video installations, which is exactly what I was to present with my I have a

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Dream exhibition. The show included internationally acclaimed artists like Stefan Constantinescu, Christoph Draeger, Regina José Galindo, Tomasz Kozak, Zuzanna Janin, NUG, Adrian Paci, Société Réaliste, Reynold Reynolds, Józef Robakowski and Alicja Żebrowska. CACT is also actively involved in the Thessaloniki Biennale, performance art festivals, and it regularly organizes conferences and seminars on art and culture. It’s safe to say that CACT is a prominent spotlight on the artistic map of Thessaloniki, since the city has a limited offer for those interested in truly contemporary phenomena.

It hides immense potential and a promise of spectacular advancement in the years to come. Even though there are plans for a new complex to house not just one but many art-presenting institutions, considering the financial problems beleaguering the Greek government and state funding, they might have to be put on hold for quite some time.

It can’t go without saying that the unflagging attitude and involvement of CACT’s managers and curators are most admirable, especially when one realizes all the hindrances they have to go through on a daily basis: the financial problems resulting in the freezing of their business accounts by the Banner advertising the exhibition on the façade of CACT. Photo: Archives of Agnieszka Rayzacher

Zuzanna Janin, “Majka from the Movie”, photo from the exhibition “I Have a Dream”. Photo: Archives of Agnieszka Rayzacher

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Christoph Daeger, “Hippie Movie”, photo. from the exhibition “I Have a Dream”. Photo: Archives of Agnieszka Rayzacher

Ministry of Culture, to name just one. They still manage to keep high standards of professionalism, maintaining an ambitious program just as they always have done. It’s easy to see where they take their energy and optimism from. The view outside the CACT windows reveals the vastness of the beautiful blue sea.

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STEEPLECHASE (from the history of museums in Russia) Natalia Goncharova, curator at the NCCA

The establishment in 1919 of the Museum Office in the Department of Visual Arts of the People’s Commissariat for Education (IZO-Narkompros) was one of the most important events in the history of museums in Russia. The idea was conceived by its founders (Wassily Kandinsky, David Sterenberg and Alexander Rodchenko) as a big museum laboratory for the studies and promotion of contemporary art. The laboratory existed exclusively thanks to subsidies from the government.

Nowadays, it is hard to imagine that, in the early 1920s, the whole of Russia was covered with a net of contemporary art museums. Thanks to this initiative, many provincial museums are proud owners of marvellous collections of avant-garde art.

This was possible because artists were invited as experts to the committees completing pieces for the museums.

However, the situation soon deteriorated. The authorities of the new Soviet state focused their attention on arts and brought a “new order” to this field. In 1926, the Institute of Artistic Culture (directed by Kazimir Malevich) was forced to close, in 1929 the Museum of Painting Culture in Moscow was closed, and the leaders of new art, without proper support, started leaving the provinces. The idea of establishing museums of contemporary art was forgotten until the late 1980s.

In the USSR, it was impossible even to dream of establishing a museum of contemporary art and the word ‘modernism’ was perceived as insulting. Only during Perestroika did the communist authorities start to become concerned – they were not able

Façade of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA). Photo: Archives of NCCA

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Exhibition view, the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA). Photo: Archives of NCCA

to transplant the products of their ideology into the field of arts due to a lack of interest among the audience. It became clear that it was a serious reason to worry. And then the idea of establishing a museum of contemporary art came back.

There were several initiatives in the late 1980s, e.g. the decision to establish a state-owned collection of contemporary art on the basis of the “Tsaritsyno” museum-reserve. At the same time, the Department of Modern Trends was opened in the Russian Museum. One has to mention that the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in the Yakimanka district in Moscow has become an important cultural institution. It was a successful concept of joining creative forces with good prospects for the future, conceived by the art historian Leonid Bazhanov. In 1992 this idea bore fruit with the establishment of a cultural cluster with branches in various regions of Russia. Nowadays, the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) is a network with local branches in Vladikavkaz, Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad, Nizhny Novgorod and Saint Petersburg.

However, the centre still needs improvements, as it has turned out that the reconstructed building of a lamp factory, with its 500 m2 of exhibition space (one exhibition hall), is too small to realize all the NCCA programmes. The management of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts has begun the long and difficult project of a new building

of NCCA (under the supervision of the director Mikhail Mindlin). Because of the crisis in 2008, some investors had to resign from the project. The professional association was not enthusiastic about such an initiative during a time of difficult economic conditions. In spite of that, the project has been realized. In the spring of 2014, the centre organized an international competition in order to choose the architectural concept of the building. A broad audience chose Kengo Kuma’s project, which will be realized at Khodynka Field.

A museum of contemporary art is, in general, defined by its collection, but this is not as simple as it sounds. Due to political and social reasons there are no collections of 20th century art in Russia, and the few existing ones are fragmented. The situation of the avant-garde from the beginning of the 20th century is an exception, but the most essential works from the 2nd part of the century can be found in the biggest collections in various countries. It is very difficult to buy them and they are extremely expensive. Nowadays, it is impossible to gather funds for such purchases. However, it is still not too late to buy interesting works created by the artists of the generation of the 1990s. In one of his interviews, the director of NCCA cited Anda Rottenberg: “15 years ago, Anda Rottenberg, the director of the National Gallery of Art ‘Zachęta’ in Warsaw of that time, was forming collections by

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purchasing works of young artists. Of course, this strategy means that we may make mistakes. Buying works of 10 young artists, one should be conscious that only 3 of them will become stars. But from the economic point of view their works will indemnify us for the mistaken purchases of the other 7 artists”.

Thus, public funds from the budget of the Russian Federation will be spent on Russian artists’ works, and the money from the board of supervisors of the foundation, patrons of art and sponsors, will be allotted for foreign masterpieces. Nowadays, we are proud to have in our museum the works of such famous artists as Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Antoni Muntadas, Jannis Kounellis, Chapman Brothers, Paul McCartney, Jaan Toomik, Jerzy Truszkowski, Stephan Balkenhol and others – altogether about 300 authors from Russia and other countries.

Among the most important NCCA projects, one should list the All-Russian contemporary visual art competition “Innovation”, in which the prizes are awarded in 5 categories, Moscow Biennale for Young Art (this year, David Elliot from Great Britain became the main curator of the biennale). The most interesting recent projects organized by NCCA in various partnerships were: Portrait/landscape: genre boundaries. From the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Nantes, France (supervisors of the project: Blandine Chavanne, director of Nantes Museum of Fine Arts; Mikhail Mindlin, general director of the

National Centre for Contemporary Arts – curators of the exhibition: Irina Gorlova, Mikhail Mindlin, Anna Gor, Adeline Collange, and Alice Fleury); the exhibition Russia XXI. Contemporary Russian Sculpture in Hague during the year “Holland-Russia” (curators of the exhibition: Alessandra Laitempergher and Irina Gorlova); the exhibition Mirosław Bałka.

Fragment with the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland (the exhibition was among the best 10 projects of the year in 2013; curators: Marek Goździewski and Natalia Goncharova); the Ural Industrial Biennale for Contemporary Art, and many others.

Exhibition view, the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA). Photo: Archives of NCCA

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Grisha Bruskin, exterior exhibition, the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA). Photo: Archives of NCCA

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FRAC – Fonds régionaux d’art contemporain – in Brittany Joanna Sitkowska-Bayle

FRACs or Regional Collections of Contemporary Art, initiated in 1981 by Jack Lang, the then Minister of Culture, boast one of the largest collections of new art in France, containing 26,000 artworks purchased from more than 4,000 living artists, not only French.

It is housed by 23 institutions, whose main task is to develop and popularize the compilation first of all regionally, but also in the whole country and abroad.

In the 1960s, André Malraux believed cultural centres, offering easy and free access to the events they staged, to be the “cathedrals of the 20th century”. Established in relation to demands for democratization of culture, within the framework of the scheme to decentralize cultural policy, FRACs were to send art out to meet the viewers. Initially, they were modest institutions without exhibition rooms, which – on the one hand – allowed a fair measure of flexibility but – on the other – required a novel approach to the concept of exhibition, departing from the tradition of displaying artworks in places specially designed to host them, such as a museum or an art gallery. As a consequence, contemporary art reached schools, colleges, hospitals, rural districts, and even prisons.

More than 30 years on, French FRACs came to maturity. Further popularization of growing collections, containing artworks that frequently required specific display and conservation conditions, was becoming increasingly difficult. The

The building of Fonds Régionaux d’Art Contemporain in Brittany, Rennes, designed by Odile Decq, 2012. Photo: Archives of FRAC in Brittany

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time came for the works to have a place “of their own”, in a location that would allow better access to them and proper storage. Additionally, spectacular successes of equally spectacular museums and art centres, the most obvious example of which is the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, inspired local authorities to harbour high ambitions, hoping that the new “temples of art” would boost cultural life and tourism. All this was a major reason for the establishment of the so-called “secondgeneration” of FRACs. In recent years, six regions have decided to construct new buildings equipped with every facility necessary for their FRACs to function successfully. Designed by Odile Decq, the FRAC building in Rennes, Brittany, is surely among the most interesting. With 4,700 artworks, the collection it holds is the largest.

The external simplicity and austerity of the building, visible from a distance, hides spatial diversity, an extremely visitor-friendly interior. The architect wanted the very act of moving within this space to be a memorable experience. Contact with contemporary art tends to be demanding. One has to prepare for it, which takes time.

Hence the idea of the gradual ascending of a ramp running along the façade of the building, like a sort of initiation. The façade has been “stilled”, as Decq put it, in order to harmonize with Aurelia Nemour’s sculptural installation, situated next to it.

L’Alignement du XXIe siècle (21st-century Alignment) consists of 72 vertical blocks of grey granite, each 4.5 m high. The architect decided to give the same size to a crevice that divides the interior into two radically different parts. The glass ceiling allows light to form a well, constituting the virtual spine of the building, thus adding a dynamic dimension to the space. The effect is reinforced by the materials used for construction. Transparent from the inside, the façade opens to the surrounding landscape as well as Nemour’s work. The concrete section on the other side of the crevice, housing exhibition rooms, is reached via ramps and stairs that unite both parts of the building.

Concrete and glass, heaviness and lightness, light and shadow. Odile Decq delights in creating tension in the internal structure, increasing its power of attraction among the visitors, without neglecting its purpose. On the first floor of the FRAC in Brittany, there are three exhibition rooms of various dimensions with access to daylight. The biggest one, meant to be an object in its own right, is suspended upon the concrete/steel skeleton of the building and covered with polished black inox on the outside. The vast atrium on the ground floor, from where most viewers begin their visit, contains another independent element typical of Odile Decq’s style. Resting only partially on the

concrete floor, an oblong shape covered with an irregularly bent red layer distinctively stands out from the surroundings. Inside it, there are rooms where concerts, film projections and meetings with the public take place. Without doubt, it is the most spectacular architectural element of FRAC, well visible from a distance, particularly at night. If we approach the building from the city in daylight, we only see a dark, rectangular shape crowned with a slightly wavy roof. In the evening, however, when the outline of the building merges with the darkness around it, it is the flame-like redness of the room lighting the building from the inside, like a huge piece of coal, that catches the eye. The coolness of the glass covering in daylight and the warmness smouldering inside at night is yet another example of “tension”, colour-related in this case, created by the architect in her projects, to which she takes a global-design approach, starting from the very construction to equipment of the interior.

Her other projects, and particularly the Museum of Contemporary Art MACRO in Rome, refurbished in 2010, also feature contrasting planes of whiteness, blackness and redness, the play of light and shadow achieved by using surfaces reflecting or absorbing light as well as similar ideas regarding organization of internal space.

In 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright’s radical design of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in NYC was the first to abandon the traditional arrangement of museum rooms, offering an open, circular space for the visitors to be able to view almost an entire exhibition at once. In Brittany, as the visitors move around the light axis from the ground floor or the basement, where stores are situated (partially accessible to the public), up to the last floor with offices and the library, they discover a peculiar assemblage of spatial forms and the exhibits on display step by step. Several decades after such architectural experiments as the Centre Pompidou in Paris or Frank Gehry’s construction in the Basque Country mentioned above, Odile Decq’s project seems to be an example of the perfect balance between a unique design, attractive to the public, and the necessary simplicity of an interior dedicated to the presentation of artworks.

Building description Height 18 m, length 52 m, breadth 30 m Total floor area: 5,000 m2 3 exhibition rooms: 1,000 m2 (500m2, 360m2, 140m2) Conservation workshops, technical rooms: 1,000 m2 Documentation centre: 400 m2 Education centre: 200 m2 Conference room and atrium: 500 m2 Cost: 18.3 million euros Year: 2012

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JOHANNESBURG ART GALLERY IN THE CONTEXT OF RACIAL TRANSFORMATION IN SOUTH AFRICA Art collections and museology from the South African perspective Aneta Pawłowska

The Republic of South Africa is a culturally and socially diverse country with racial inequality still visible due to nearly fifty years of apartheid rule (from 1948 to 1994), when the only people enjoying fully unrestricted civil rights and liberties were people with white skin. For that very reason, the question about the origins of the collections accumulated by the museums and galleries of South Africa: what do they communicate and who is really speaking through them? – remains one of the most urgent issues in contemporary culture.

When considering South African museology, one needs to remember that the beginnings of organized art–presenting establishments fell in the third quarter of the 19th century, whereas the end of that century brought some fundamental changes to the status of the artist and art itself. It was the time when art education and official art presentation began to take shape. Modern venues designed solely for the purpose of housing art collections and displaying them, like museums and galleries, were established. However, since these were colonial times, those actions were utterly biased and completely exclusive of the indigenous art by the native people of this land. The 19th century in South Africa was a time of British domination, with British settlers conquering this country militarily whilst bringing and distributing their own cultural achievements. Their intellectual colonization manifested itself through various channels like

Façade of Johannesburg Art Gallery. Photo: Archives of Johannesburg Art Gallery

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art museums and galleries. It’s worth noting that this process occurred on two levels. The domestic one – premised on constructing a certain image of the colonies back in England: for example, the Benin bronzes put on display in The British Museum or the famous World Exhibitions in London, and another one happening offshore which relied on creating museums devoted to European culture with the emphasis on British accomplishments within the colonized regions, like India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. This was indeed the purpose of the colonial art collections of the Victorian era; and this agenda is clear to see when looking at the origins of most art galleries in South Africa, for instance in Cape Town, Durban, Pietermaritzburg or even in Johannesburg to some extent. Those venues stood for the essence of colonial art collections in the provinces, their content relying entirely on the prolificacy and talent of British subjects who supplied them. At the most fruitful moment when many art galleries were brought to life only to commemorate links between this region and the Crown, the first public gallery was established in Cape Town in 1896 on the order of the Governor. This was the South African Art Gallery – now known as the South African National Gallery (SANG).

Domination of the white minority over the art discourse and art exhibiting was complete and unquestionable until the 1980s. Some memorable exhibitions of black artists took place around that time: Tributaries: A View of Contemporary South African Art opened in 1984 as well as The Neglected Tradition which was inaugurated four years later when the curators Ricky Burnett and Steven Sacks decided to present contemporary black artists and their art to the wider public. Strangely, the fading shadow of colonialism is still menacing, even though the changes to the way this country is being governed were made decades ago. South Africa is now an independent and democratic state and its black artists are able to openly express themselves and talk about their needs in that matter.

The beginnings of Johannesburg Art Gallery The changes that took place within the cultural politics in the last twenty years are particularly prominent in Johannesburg – the city of gold mines, the biggest and richest city in the south of Africa (the population is growing rapidly and is now in excess of 5 million people). It’s the focal point for South African industry, which became the main leverage for this part of the continent. The local university, established in 1922 (Wits University), is of great importance; there is also the Johannesburg Art Gallery dating back to 1910. Originally, it was the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and was located in Transvaal University College, it was later renamed

The Johannesburg Art Gallery and moved to a separate building for its own use. Florence Philips was the person who initiated those changes, she was the wife of the local mining tycoon Lionel Philips; business people of his sort were dubbed “randlords” in the local jargon. Together with other rich moguls from South Africa he financed the new art museum. Significantly, Johannesburg was a very young city, which posed quite a challenge for the potential art institutions and those determined to popularize art and culture. The city had begun to form in the 1880s – its beginnings were marked by the rising gold rush. Luckily, Florence Philips had numerous connections in the high society of London, so the idea of launching an art gallery was quite feasible. Philips’ circle of friends included emancipated writer and water-colour painter Caroline Grosvenor, Irish art dealer Hugh Lane and numerous English painters from the modernist circle gathering around the New English Art Club, like Phillip Wilson Steer or Walter Richard Sickert.

It was Lane who watched over and helped to plan the acquisitions for the future art collection, he also generously granted a loan to secure swift purchases.

He himself decided on the content of the collection which was pretty much a reflection of his own taste in the modern art of that time. He actually included French Impressionists into the selection which was not something to be expected since the majority of his peers were stark defenders of the “Rule Britannia” status, also in the field of arts. An interesting fact was that the complete collection was presented during a special exhibition in the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1910, shortly before they were dispatched to South Africa.

130 works were purchased in total. Apart from the leading British contemporary artists of that time, there were also Belgian, Italian and Dutch paintings. An exception was made for the latter as some 17th century works were also included to emphasise the close cultural links between the Netherlands and South Africa. What Lane failed to take into account was the art produced by the native Africans themselves, unless one is willing to mention the naturalized Dutchman Anton van Wouw (1862-1945) whose works became part of a display in the sculpture section. It was supposedly meant as a nod toward the Afrikaans since van Wouw was their enthusiastic follower and admirer.

Lane’s justification for the absence of genuinely African art can be found in his Prefatory Notice where he describes the indigenous art as lacking in maturity and thus not worthy enough. Allegedly, the higher purpose of this collection that influenced his choices was to inspire the Transvaal settlers to start their own “nation of artists”. The conservative circles of Johannesburg art critics, for example

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Extension of Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1987. Photo: Archives of Johannesburg Art Gallery

James Smithardt, disparaged the new collection for dismissing some seemingly obvious choices like Constable and Turner, who were perceived, and to this day remain lauded, as torch-bearers of modernity. However, Lane was only regretful about not giving enough attention to some French artists, particularly the members of the Barbizon School and Impressionists, he was also keen to add the celebrated works of Pre-Raphaelites to his selection.

The latter oversight was atoned in 1912 in the form of a donation from Sigismund Neumann, the gift consisting of several paintings by Walter Deverell and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The gallery’s politics in the time of apartheid In the 1930s and 1940s the collection was supplemented by some of the most celebrated French Impressionists, like Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and August Rodin. There was a prominent place reserved especially for PreRaphaelites like John Everett Millais and for the Modernists. In 1934 the Johannesburg collection was extended by the Print Cabinet.

We need to remember that, until the 1940s, there was no real department for acquisitions to speak of and that most of the exhibits were gifts. Edmund Gyngell stepped in as a temporary custodian and curator for the collection; his attempts at purchasing new items were curbed by the Art Gallery Committee, the situation was not dissimilar to what was going on with Zachęta Gallery in Poland during

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the twenty years of the inter-war period.

The original collection of Johannesburg Gallery from 1910 is displayed in the building designed by the renowned British architect Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), who Lane persuaded to get involved in this grand offshore project in order to ensure an appropriate architectural setting for his collection.

It needs to be said that, at that time, no other public gallery in South Africa could boast of customdesigned quarters for the sole purpose of art presentation, not the one in Pietermaritzburg, nor the one in Durban, nor even the most prestigious and oldest one in Cape Town. Those establishments usually had locations that were already built to serve other functions, like town halls, for instance.

The erection of Johannesburg Gallery spanned from 1911 to 1915. It was supervised by the local architect Robert Howden and it was still unfinished on the day it was opened to the public. Toward the end of the 1930s, its first fully-fledged and academically competent curator, Anton Hendrik (1899-1975), decided that, apart from exhibiting Old Masters, the modern art gallery ought to serve educational purposes as well, this could only be achieved by including contemporary art exhibitions, and so the need for some extra space emerged.

As a consequence, in 1946 Hendriks came up with a fresh and coherent plan for the future acquisitions which implicated the presence of contemporary French artists representing Cubism: Pablo Picasso and Albert Gleizes, together with the

most accomplished South African artists like Gwelo Goodman, Bertha Everard, Hugo Naude, Frans David Oerder, Pieter Wenning, Irma Stern, Jacobus Hendrik (Henk) Pierneef, Maud Sumner. Walter Battiss and, last but not least, Alexis Preller. It was during his time – at the end of the 1950s - that the gallery was bestowed with the remarkable donation of 17 canvases of the seventeenth century Dutch masters, presented by the Amsterdam art dealer Eduard Houthakker. Hendriks also takes full credit for organizing a learning opportunity for black students at the gallery’s facilities – a bold move considering apartheid seriously restricted education for the African people. There was a crowd of black artists associated with the progressive group called Polly Street Art Centre led by Cecil Skotnes (1926-2009).

It was the only place where in the 1950s and 60s they could actually learn and appreciate the leading art trends. It was the only cultural institution in Johannesburg always open and accepting toward other people, no matter what their nationality or skin colour. (“The Johannesburg Art Gallery has always been open to all races”).

Nel Erasmus, the gallery’s curator from 1966 and Cubist / Abstractionist, purchased a sculpture by Henry Moore followed by a – controversial at the time – purchase of Tete d’Arlequin – a drawing by Picasso. Financial means were provided by the Friends of the Johannesburg Art Association. Today it’s safe to say it gave the overseas gallery an ultramodern glitz.

Redress Christopher Till (b. 1952) taking up the position of executive director in 1983 and introducing his policy of redress was a turning point for the gallery.

His intention was to raise the status of the native African heritage that was persistently rejected and obliterated in the past. Till decided to supplement the collection with genuine South African Art. Today this section is known as the Brenthurst Collection. He also co-curated a ground-breaking exhibition presenting works of black artists, which was opened in 1988 under the title: The Neglected Tradition: towards a new history of South African art (1930-1988). Another milestone fell in 1992 when the first black person – Bongi Dhlomo took a seat in the Art Gallery Committee. She is an art critic and alumna of Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre. The forerunners of black South African art, like Gerard Sekoto or Durant Sihlali, started appearing, followed by a younger generation of painters like Tony Nkotsi (b. 1955) and Sam Nhlengethwa (b. 1955).

Present day: the building and the collection The main issue all of the successive curators have had to face in their time was the limited exhibition

space. There was an extension in the form of the western wing added in 1940, much in accordance with Lutyens’ intention; but still the building remained somewhat different from the original design even upon its completion. It was only after a full restoration by Meyer Pienar and Associates that the gallery got its long awaited makeover which turned the interior into airy and spacious exhibiting rooms. Today there are fifteen large exhibiting halls, and additionally there is a selection of sculptures placed all over the Petrus Jacobus Joubert Park surrounding the gallery. Clive Kellner who was the managing director from 2004 to 2009 took some steps towards modernizing the library and the cafe together with reconstruction of the north hallway; he also updated the museum’s security system.

Kellner was strongly in favour of another extension.

The current director Antoinette Murdoch is also happy to keep pace with modern-day requirements, however, her main interest and concern is the gallery’s involvement in art education.

The Johannesburg collection as it is today consists of the works of native black African people complemented by 19th century European and British art. Occasionally, the 17th century Dutch Masters are on display. Naturally, there is an emphasis gravitating toward the contemporary black artists and their accomplishments: David Koloane (b.

1938), Kagiso Pat Mautloa (b. 1952) and Helen Sebidi (b. 1943) are a few examples that spring to mind.

Not forgetting the phenomena called grey areas – American art historian John Peffer thinks there are territories where, in the act of defiance against apartheid, black and white artists came together, united through their art and working side by side as peers in the artistic and social sense of this word.

JAG is equally keen on showcasing prints as they are on paintings. Works by Kay Hassan and members of the Artist Proof Studio are on display to testify to it, not forgetting the new media and photography represented by Clive van den Berg, Berni Searle, Tracey Rose or Thando Mama.

The contemporary ethnic art from the Republic of South Africa is also a significant part of the JAG’s collection, with one of its subdivisions devoted to artistic creations by the white settlers, which is hugely interesting as it shows the mutual influences between both races. The “classics” like Irma Stern, Alexis Preller or Walter Battiss envisage those parallels in a most blatant and striking manner.

Johannesburg Art Gallery Tel: +27 (0)11 725 3130 Email: jag@joburg.org.za

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“CHERCHER LE GARÇON” IN MAC/VAL NEAR PARIS Joanna Bojda

On the 10th Anniversary of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vitry-sur-Seine, the paraphrased notion once made by Simone de Beauvoir: One is not born but rather becomes a man – was turned into a leitmotiv of the exhibition dealing with the ever-sopresent problem of masculinity as experienced and seen by men, around a hundred living male artists, to be precise. Especially for the exhibition, which is headlined Searching for a boy, selected artists analyse, deconstruct and challenge both the stereotypes and myths of what it means to be a man. Finding references to the traditional representation of the male body, his role in society, man as a contemporary artist, references to transsexualism, hermaphroditism or homosexuality, those artists explore all kinds of male sexuality, questioning along the way the ubiquitous male dominance together with the social norms and stereotypes imposed by the latter. All the commonplace clichés concerning men were called into doubt, like being figures of authority, their strength, heroism, their love of conquest or even their efficiency. There is a visible objection to any potential form of control or restraint that male identity could and does suffer from as a result of such stereotypes. There is an acute need to challenge and to deconstruct such widely accepted doxa.

Male carnality, the very nature of fatherhood, their soft side, ambiguity of what we think determines sexes and, last but not least, the

Pierre Molinie, „Luciano Castelli”. 1975. Black and white photography, collection of 4 photographies 17,7 x 12,7 cm.

Collection Frac Aquitaine. © Adagp, Paris 2015. Photo © Frédéric Delpech

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Bernard Mario Patrick, „Le bonhomme“, 2010. Performance, Series consisting of 3 chapters. Chapter n° 2. Co-production: Ménagerie de Verre, Association du 48.

Supported by DRAC – Art in the city/Town council of Paris.

context of gender performativity are taken under scrutiny by artists using a whole wide range of artistic media, including: satire, parody, pastiche, fetishism, masquerade and dressing-up. The variety and quantity of techniques match the abundance of works themselves as we find photography, performance, video-art, body art, sculpture, documentation, archival records and installation. All these works have one thing in common – to find the answer to the question: What does it mean to be a man in the 21st century?

The title: Searching for a boy implies the possibility of more than one version of masculinity in this society with a titular boy as a contradiction to what the majority are willing to accept as a boy – a white,

heterosexual male. It’s clear that the boy doesn’t meet the generally approved but highly idealistic criteria of the male image, hence subsequent artists decided to challenge the popular stereotypes, like the strongman (Yan Xing, video The History of Fugue), the family man (Taysir Batniji, series Fathers), the soldier (Meiro Kizumi, video Portrait of a Young Samurai) or to question the male beauty canon (Carlos Pazos, Models d’escultures). They all examine and analyse attitudes that machoism doesn’t account for, accentuating the importance of appreciation for other qualities, such as: transsexualism, cross-dressing, kindness, weakness, volatility or passiveness which all constitute the make-up of a contemporary man.

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Dan Finsel, „The Space Between You and Me“, 2012. Video, 28’54’’. Courtesy of the artist and Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles

During the show, 6 day-long events were organized consisting of various performances, lectures, film screenings, interviews or exhibition tours by the participating artists. For instance, Charlie Jeffrey, who was among those invited to arrange a performance within the grounds of the exhibition, was chanting I hate Yves Klein but I’m grateful to Bruce Nauman while painting his face white. The video of Bruce Nauman in his Flesh white to black to flesh from 1968 is screened next to him. The latter is an hourlong footage showing the artist painting his face, torso and his hands with black paint only to wipe it off afterwards. Charlie Jeffrey’s white face is most

Maurizio Cattelan, „untitled (Zorro)“, 1999. Acryl on canvas.

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Perrotin.

Photo: Archives of MAC/VAL, exhibition „Chercher le garçon“

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likely related to Art Make Up – a video from 1967 where Nauman paints himself white (later on he replaces white with pink, green and black paint). I’m guessing Jeffrey’s intention was to make up for the lack of Bruce Nauman’s work at the exhibition.

A natural absence caused probably by the spatial and financial limitations of the museum.

The important issue of artists’ own identity against their artistic background and their environment is also tackled, and in doing that many of them relate to the popular, celebrated icons of the art world deconstructing the myth of the modern artist. And so, not only Klein, but also Malevich, Duchamp or Pollock are “quoted” when revisiting the archetypal image of an artist – a man, a loner and much idealized genius, which has now been proven outdated and simply untrue.

Laurent Prexl, Ciprian Mureşan and Fayçal Baghriche all are somehow mockingly inspired by Klein’s Leap into the Void stripping it of its heroic dimension and turning it into a subject of amusement. Both Prexl, with his work from 2006 Bien fait = mal fait = pas fait = pas faisable (transl.: well done = badly done = undone = undoable), and Mureşan, Leap into the Void – After Three Seconds from 2004, show the whole scenario initiated by Klein including its expected culmination. The first one goes back to the photograph’s original location, the second is staged in a Romanian village. The final effect is similar in both cases: the genius artist is hit

by Reality – the pavement slabs. The leap can be considered a failure, thus a non-heroic image of

Charles Feger, “Rudas”, 2010. Coloured photography, 76 x 58 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Archives of MAC/VAL, exhibition “Chercher le garçon”

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an artist is conceived. A different take is adopted

by Fayçal Baghriche who takes the original picture and (using Photoshop) erases the artist from his work, but leaves the original title. It hints at Robert Rauschenberg who once used a rubber eraser on a Willem Kooning drawing.

There is a Polish accent at Chercher le garçon in the form of documentation showing happenings

by Krzysztof Niemczyk, who was a performer, situation artist, writer and painter. He was also a gay man in his private life. Krzysztof was popular

state that Poland then was. The naked body as a tool of political provocation is also used by the Croatian artist Tomislav Gotovac. Documentation of his performance in Belgrade that occurred in 1971: Streaking (Running naked in the City Center) is a part of the exhibition. Chercher le garçon also presents bodily experiments conducted by Ion Grigorescu and Jiri Kovanda, who use the body to confront the closeness of other people within a public space.

The presence of numerous artists from Central Europe allows this issue to be expanded to the

Tobias Bernstrup, „Killingspree“, from the collection « Allégories du Grand Théâtre du Monde », 2008

and acknowledged in France where his only book Courtesan and the chicks was published in 1999, a couple of years after his death. Its Polish edition appeared 8 years later. His unpublished diaries are also on show, giving testimony to the turbulent life of a homosexual man in the Poland of the 60s.

During his illegal actions in Cracow, Niemczyk used his own – often naked – body to interact with public space, confronting the grim reality together with the despotism and oppression of the communist

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representations of masculinity from other regions than just Western European.

The exhibition in MAC/VAL is extremely well prepared, and with its content full of merit it could be an exhaustive compendium of gender and men’s studies. Raewyn Connell, who pioneered the theory of the hegemonic concept of masculinity, contributed to the catalogue with an essay. The curator of the exhibition was determined to present gender as sex determined by cultural standards

and expectations, in performative terms as coined

by Butler. This presentation encourages viewers to question this binary system of sexes and to challenge the male role seen as a domineering one, assembling works that definitely broaden the viewer’s horizons, enabling them to appreciate how authority, pop culture or patriarchy shaped our understanding of masculinity.

The title and location: Chercher le garçon, Musée de l’art contemporain in Vitry-sur-Seine Duration: 07.03.2015–30.08.2015 Curator: Frank Lamy Some of the credits: Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Maurizio Cattelan, Alain Declerq, Thomas Eller, Dan Finsel, Charles Fréger, Tomislav Gotovac, Ion Grigorescu, Michel Jurniac, Jiri Kovanda, Robert Mapplethrope, Pierre Molinier, Yasumasa Morimura, Ciprian Mureşan, Bruce Nauman, Krzysztof Niemczyk, Phillipe Perrin, Laurent Prexl, and Yan Xing Admission: € 5

Digital print on aluminium 53 x 80 cm.

Private collection of Sylvie et Stéphane Corréard, Paris.

Nogues Oriol, “Le Roi” The exposition. « Chercher le garçon », MAC/VAL 2015. On the right: Tomislav Gotovac, “Foxy Mister”, 2002.

Centre: Pierrick Sorin, “C’est mignon tout ça”, 1993. Bottom: Jason Karaďndros, “Sculpture”, 1994. Photo © Martin Argyroglo. © Adagp, Paris 2015

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“Homosexuality_ies” INTERDISCIPLINARY EXHIBITION FOCUSED ON THE HISTORY AND CULTURE OF SEXUAL MINORITIES IN BERLIN Katarzyna Nowak

Homosexuality_ies1 is a joint effort from two Berlin museums: Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) and Schwules Museum* (SM). It covers 1,600 m2 of floor space and 150 years of the history, politics and culture of homosexual men and women in Germany. This show reveals all the ways in which homosexuals and other people of non-conformist sexual inclinations became socially marginalized: discriminated by the legal system or stigmatized by the medical profession. It follows the legislative developments of paragraph 175 in the German Penal Code, classifying “homosexual practices” as illegal and prosecutable by law. The paragraph came into force in 1872; it was intensely practised during the Nazi period to be eventually renounced when homosexual acts were de-penalized in 1969 and ultimately removed from the Penal Code in 1994.

However, it’s not just a tale of social inequality and repression – most of all it attempts to present the record of resistance from various groups that started sprouting up in the 1960s when the legal and social circumstances of gay people became more relaxed. Those groups played a vital part in transforming the social climate, subsequently 1 The German title and its English translation Homosexualität_ en“ / ”Homosexuality_ies both use the so-called Gender_Gap – an underscore sign to highlight that it represents both sexes and all of the gender identities. However, I decided to change it into an asterisk for the Polish version of the title, as the asterisk has a similar function to Gender_Gap; Schwules Museum* for that matter included “*” after the term “Gay” Museum signalling that all its resources, research and activities go beyond “gay” – the asterisk symbolises its openness to a variety of identities as opposed to the binary system of sexes and genders. It doesn’t make sense since the title is in English – we can cancel it.

Calling card, from 1895 with a note: “To Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite (sic!)”. This was evidence in the libel case against John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry. © The National Archives, London (UK CRIM 1/41/6 f. 1) Photo: “Homosexuality_ies” press releases

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Source unknown: “Brothers in arms”, ca 1913, sepia photograph © Schwules Museum*, Berlin. Photo: “Homosexuality_ies” press releases

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Walpurgis in Berlin, 1983, Photography by Petra Gall © Schwules Museum*, Berlin, The Petra Gall collection. Photo: “Homosexuality_ies” press releases

changing the way we perceive cultural and sexual identities today.

A significant part of the exposition arranged in DHM focuses on the history of sexual minorities from the moment “when homosexuality was discovered” in the 19th century. SM on the other hand, seems to be interested more in the aspect of how homosexuality* is being presented in contemporary art and what the future of our gender and sexual codes is.

The flashy opening night on 25 June was an elaborate event that took place in the Schlüter courtyard of the Old Armoury (the only remaining Baroque building in the possession of DHM) and was accompanied by a hip-hop concert from Sookee.

The number of visitors amounted to 1,300 people, mostly from the LGBTIQ communities. What was constantly repeated like a mantra in references to the exhibition was: “ground-breaking”. Is it really ground-breaking and, if yes, to what degree? I have consulted Dr Sarah Bornhorst, who is the exhibition coordinator with DHM and she has pointed out a few significant aspects.

Ground-breaking in terms of hosting institutions DHM is the largest historical museum in Germany, funded by public means and, due to its status, it mostly focuses on big historical and cultural

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issues. SM is a privately managed institution with its main interests oscillating around history and the social response to the non-heteronormative part of German society. It was established in 1958, and much later in 2011 the state provided a venue for their own exclusive use, which now houses the archives, library and four show rooms. Two institutions that seem worlds apart, divided by the scale of their influence, their mission and their objectives – being united by a joint presentation is quite a rarity in its own right. Those two establishments carrying out a joint event under DHM’s roof may be seen as a self-reflecting and selfquestioning intervention that accounts for entirely different narratives than those supported by the majority of society and its traditional, conservative culture.

The ground-breaking scale of re- (and) presentation Homosexuality_ies, let’s be frank, is not the first presentation of the culture and history of homosexual men and women, however, it is the first project of such a scale and volume in Germany, and definitely the first one to give half of its exposure and exhibiting space to non-heteronormative women. All sorts of sexual identities were included in this project, which shows how bold and uncompromising the approach it adopts is. There’s

Sign post: Information signs for “preventive detainees”, facsimile © ITS Bad Arolsen. Photo: “Homosexuality_ies” press releases

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Siemens Convulsator III, a device for electroconvulsion therapy, Württembergisches Psychatriemuseum Zwiefalten © Marco Sedelmayer, 1951. Photo: “Homosexuality_ies” press releases

been over thirty years of similar shows occurring all over the world: Art and Homosexuality in Italy, 2007 (it opened in Milan but due to the protests from the Catholic Church it was closed down and later re-opened in Florence), Hide/Seek in The National Portrait Gallery in Washington 2011, Ars Homo Erotica in 2010 – the National Museum of Warsaw. Those exhibitions mostly consider gay men and only allow a miserably small number of lesbian artists to represent gay women, not to mention other minorities.

Ground-breaking funds Kulturstiftung des Bundes and Kulturstiftung der Länder (German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Cultural Foundation of the German State) combined their funds, managing € 960,000 to finance the exhibition. This sum alone is quite impressive, however, the fact that two such grand and respectable institutions recognized this event as significant to the cultural landscape of the year 2015

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(although preparations took nearly 4 years) – even in a land of seasoned democracy like Germany – seems somehow bold as the public debate on sexual minorities intensifies.2 Exhibition – range of subjects The panel of curators chaired by Dr Birgit Bosold (other members are: Dr Dorothée Brill and Detlef Weitz) aimed higher than showing a mere history of persecution and eventual triumphant liberalization from the society’s oppressive morality, instead they decided to illustrate the diversity of sexualities that come in all shapes and sizes, even though the hardrooted heterosexual templates still dominate and organize our reality.

2 This exhibition was opened in the midst of heated public discussion across the media. The subject was whether to legalize homosexual marriages in order to give them equal rights with heterosexual ones. Civil partnerships introduced in 2001 do not offer the same privileges. However with the CDU leadership there is little chance for such a change in legislation any time soon.

The content is divided into 10 chapters devoted to the key issues: “First time”, “The other sex”, “Other paintings”, “Rough Knowledge”, “Dishonour”, “In front of the jury”, “Remembrance Space – Pink Triangle”, “Hetero(matrix), “Private equals political”, “What’s next?”.

The exhibited items come from the fields of social history and culture, from the mid-19th century up to the present day. Different cultural fields, like visual arts, literature, theatre, film and music, are enriched and completed by the relevant historical documentation. The main objective is to open up the space to experimentation and to draw visitors into interactive simulations, encouraging lively social discussion.

One of the most fascinating things on show is the original hand-written letter from Karl Maria Kertbeny to the reformer of the German legal system Karl Heinrich Ulrich. The letter was issued in 1868 and it is believed to be the oldest written record where the words “homosexual” and “homosexuality” are used. There are works by the pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld – founder of the Institute for Sexual Research that was raided and closed down by the Nazis in 1933. Nearly 100,000 homosexuals were convicted just like common criminals, around 15,000 got deported and incarcerated inside concentration camps (See: “Pink Triangle”).

The following contemporary artists were selected to contribute their poignant commentary on relations between sexuality, gender and body; between social conventions and their transgression: Monica Bonvicini, Louise Bourgeois, Heather Cassils, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Nicole Eisenman, Katarzyna Kozyra, Tamara de Lempicka, Lee Lozano, Jeanne Mammen, Zanele Muholi, Henrik Olesen, Sturtevant, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Andy Warhol and many more.

own community – would easily become a source of discord, which is exactly what happened prior to the opening night. A fortnight before the event, an advertising campaign started mostly in the LGBTIQ-related press, causing an angry response from the hundreds of gay men living comfortably in steady relationships who felt that they were misrepresented by the advertising poster (showing Heather Cassils flaunting her newly-transformed body).

Regardless of its flaws and weaknesses, Homosexuality_ies is a huge achievement and a benchmark for future exhibitions presenting homosexual themes and related subjects.

I am anticipating the arrival of another internationally acclaimed exhibition, only this time devoted entirely to lesbian art.

Duration of the exhibition: 26.06.2015–01.12.2015 More info at: www.dhm.de – Deutsches Historisches Museum www.schwulesmuseum.de – Schwules Museum*

Finishing note The exhibition could, of course, attract some criticism. For example, it can’t go unnoticed that even though Homosexuality_ies supposedly tells the story of sexual minorities in Germany, most of the exhibits originate from Berlin. This could be excused however, when one realizes that most of the private archives that survived to our times were located in the capital; and as to the time frame of the last 150 years – as unconvincing as it might be, it was probably much more realistic to carry out. No one would stand behind this project if it was to illustrate homosexual relations from antiquity to modern times, if only for financial and organizational reasons.

It’s only natural that the attempt to present homosexual culture and history – even within its Homage to Benglis, a part of the larger work of CUTS: A Traditional Sculpture, © Heather Cassils and Robin Black, 2011. Photo: “Homosexuality_ies” press releases

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Façade of The Hainaut Province’s Museum of Art in Charleroi Photo : © Leslie Artamonow

CoCA in…

Review of Contemporary Art Centres and Museums quarterly Publisher: Centre of Contemporary Art “Znaki Czasu” in Toruń ul. Wały gen. Sikorskiego 13, 87-100 Toruń, Poland Editorial office address: ul. Wały gen. Sikorskiego 13, 87-100 Toruń, Poland phone: +48 56 610 97 00 e-mail: info@csw.torun.pl Editorial board: Malina Barcikowska, Mateusz Bieczyński, Natalia Cieślak, Dobrila Denegri, Ewelina Jarosz, Jacek Kasprzycki, Anna Kompanowska (Issue Editor), Paweł Łubowski (Editor-in-Chief), Sławomir Marzec, Marta Smolińska, Krzysztof Stanisławski, Jerzy Olek Graphic design: Max Skorwider (Art Director), Paweł Łubowski, Wojciech Kuberski Collaborators: Christine Coquillat (Paris), Magdalena Durda, Daria Kołacka (Basel), Roman Kubicki, Zuzanna Mannke (Essen), Anna Markowska, Olga Sienko (London), Tadeusz Sawa-Borysławski, Grzegorz Sztabiński, Miško Šuvaković (Belgrade) Translations: Monika Ujma, Hanna Piątkiewicz, Zofia Smith Proofreading: Ian Corkil, Paweł Falkowski, Katarzyna Radomska Editorial board reserves the right to shorten articles and correspondence, and to give them titles. Unsolicited materials will not be returned. Editorial board is not responsible for the content of advertisements.

Advertisements and promotion: info@csw.torun.pl Subscription: ksiegarnia@csw.torun.pl Printed by: ARTiS Poligrafia s.c. ul. Granitowa 7/9, 87-100 Toruń ISSN 2299-6893

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