Hannah Hurtzig, Flight Case Archive of Mobile Academy, 2003-2010, © Peter Cox, Eindhoven - Van Abbemuseum

Museum of American Art, Berlin, Sites of Modernity (collection of the Museum of Antiquities) (1502-2010), 2010, © Peter Cox, Eindhoven - Van Abbemuseum

Steven ten Thije

*1980, lives and works in Amsterdam and Eindhoven.

Steven ten Thije is a project leader of the new L’Internationale project »The Uses of Art – on the legacy of 1848 and 1989«. L’Internationale is a confederation of six European heritage institutes dealing with modern and contemporary art and culture. He co-curated together with Charles Esche, Bart de Baere, Anders Kreuger and Jan de Vree »Spirits of Internationalism« (21/01/2012 until 29/04/2012) at the Van Abbemuseum. This exhibition was of the first L’Internationale project. He also works on a PhD research investigating the complex interplay between curating, art history and media-history. Before he was part of the team that organized »Play Van Abbe« (2009 till 2011). He is coordinator of »The Autonomy Project« and has published various articles and reviews, among others in »Exhibiting the New Art«, »Op Losse Schroeven« and »When Attitudes Become Form 1969«, (2010). He has studied art history and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

ZOLDER MUSEUM UNIVERS(E)ity, Class Photo, students and teachers wearing sweaters from THE FASHION OF CHRIST (Zolder Museum’s fashion brand made by Iva Supic Jankovic), Beauty Salon, Ferwert, Friesland, September 2013, Photo: Pernille Lonstrup

ZOLDER MUSEUM UNIVERS(E)ity, Class: Practical Training in Thinking given by Snejanka Mihaylova, Garden house, August 2013, Photo: Ayako Nishibori

ZOLDER MUSEUM UNIVERS(E)ity, Class: The loss of hope is more than the loss of everything given by Rory Pilgrim, Beauty Salon, Ferwert, Friesland, September 2013, Photo: Iva S Jankovic

In the light of the issues that preoccupy me at the moment, reading the previous contribution to this blog by Luis Jacob and Nikita Yingqian Cai, it seems to me that one of today’s more urgent topics is the position of museums in civil society. Yingqian Cai gives a detailed description of the museum boom in contemporary China. The biggest »development« from China’s recent prosperity is the »middle-class«, but »[it] is the patron as well as the audience of private museums, yet they cannot take on any representative forms within the same structure.« Jacob puts these somewhat sober remarks in a more generalized perspective. He also points out that the civil structures of the older Western nations, which should allow for an active and engaged middle class, are profoundly corrupted. According to him: »Voting is like canned life, the taxidermy version of the living experience of making a decision.« He goes on to propose another model for understanding the way in which the symbolic order could be challenged and moulded by an art, which takes as its basis the possibility to create an experience of »openness« through reduction. What is compelling in these two contributions is the fact they somehow combine the reality of today’s globalised world with a provocative philosophical theory. However, what both contributions leave largely untouched is the role that I was explicitly asked to think about: that of the artist.

What possibilities do artists have today to engage with the public art museum and with civil society? In preparation for this blog post, three roles in or characteristics of contemporary artistic practice were proposed to me and were foregrounded as key to the current functioning of the artist: 1.) critique, 2.) transformation or institutional reform, 3.) artists using the model of the museum for their work. This last point, in particular, is interesting, as it points towards the fact that many artists today use the model of the institution as a base for their practice. You have, for instance, the »Museum of American Art« (which doesn’t even consider itself to be an artist project, but simply a museum), Hannah Hurtzig’s »Mobile Academy«, the »Zolder Museum« in Amsterdam, run by Iva Supic Jankovic, or »The Immigrant Movement International« directed by Tania Bruguera, and the list could go on and on. Of course, this development is not a complete novelty (think of Marcel Broodthaers or Claes Oldenburg and their museums), but there does seem to be something specific about it.

What I recognize as quite specific to these projects is that they connect to a trend to disperse artistic practice into society. This dispersal is quite different from the more monumental »displacement« of artistic practice so characteristic for the art produced in the 60s and 70s in Land Art and for forms of Concept and Minimal art. It also appears to differ from the relational art of the 90s, even if it can perhaps be understood as a development of its underlying attitude. Because what I see as specific to this dispersal is not that artists work in places different from studios, museums or galleries, but that they develop long-term activities which even start to take on an institutional quality. It is through these institutional entities that these artists do their work, and they no longer produce a provocative critique, which remains symbolic, but genuinely work to effect a real change in the world or to equip their art to function as a type of research entity.

Artists thereby appear to sacrifice something, in that the »works« these institutes produce rarely function as vehicles for expression. The idea that artists should express something that comes forth out of their own subjectivity, and the related idea of artistic genius, both seem very distant from what these particular artists do. To me, this seems to relate to a general restructuring of the role of the individual within modern societies. Where the drive of the 60s and 70s, and perhaps to some degree also the 80s and 90s, was emancipatory and focused strongly on liberating the individual within society. Today it seems a big open question whether there still exists such a thing as society – and who is responsible for keeping it working and coherent. Ideas like the »Big Society«, as promoted in the UK, or the »participatory society«, as the re-worked version now introduced in the Netherlands is called, all point towards governments which are taking a step back and leaving part of the social infrastructure to »others«. This development, together with the deadlock situation between the current super powers (think especially of Syria, or a bit further back the failure to address climate change), makes it far from clear to individuals where and how they are represented. As a result people do not feel so much as though they have a government, or that they are individuals who should strive for visibility within a big, bureaucratic public sphere. Instead they feel that they have to tackle two demands: to recognize issues and to think of structures that could help resolve these issues. The artists’ institutions proliferating today connect to this development in a constructive manner by reclaiming a public space that is organised from start to finish and not just critiqued or represented.

The artists who are using a museum model for their work do, therefore, better represent one particular form of institutionalized artistic practice today and, in a sense, also take a practical approach towards it. Iva Supic Jankovic’s »Zolder Museum« (literally translated as »attic museum«, which refers to its location in an attic in Amsterdam) is a typical example of this sort of new approach to institutionalism. »The Zolder Museum«, as is stated on its website, »is a movement of ideas as much as it is the physical space; it is an attitude towards artistic creation and life as much as it is an art institution.« The museum is not a critical reflection on what museums are, but instead it uses the institutional forms of collecting, exhibiting and mediation as tools to talk about basic questions on how to live a good life. In such a project, the museum is used as a sustaining structure that allows the »work« to be not only a representation of something, but to become a platform for concrete action. It is not a reflection on how we are living, but more a way to live.

For established museums, how they should respond to this new type of artistic institutionality remains an open question. The Van Abbemuseum, for which I work, is active in exploring possibilities, but there is no clear model or answer yet. The museum has acquired, for instance, two installations from the Museum of American Art and, as such, is now a museum that has collected part of another museum. Another acquisition is the »Flight Case Archive« from Hannah Hurtzig, containing audio-visual documents of many activities of the »Mobile Academy«. And in December we will open an exhibition entitled, »The Museum of Art Útil«, which is a collaboration with Tania Bruguera, and, in a sense, brings together a body of artistic projects which all linger in the limbo space between the symbolic space of art and the real public sphere. It is clear that, with each of these acquisitions or projects, the museum is confronted both by the limits of itself and by what are the sometimes unforeseen possibilities within it. We also feel that, even if it is perhaps a bit simplistic, this case-by-case approach is the best way forward. Our ambition thereby is, to allow these new artists’ institutions to change us permanently, making us less and less a conventional museum that collects and displays and more and more a partner in very different types of activities, which are sometimes inside the museum and sometimes outside. In this sense, we appear to be mirroring – or perhaps it’s better to say following – the new role of the artist in becoming more and more dispersed.