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This panel discussion was chaired by Robert Fleck (Director, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg). Participants:Zdenka Badovinac (Director, Moderna Galerija/Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia), Lynne Cooke (Curator, Dia Art Foundation, New York), Vasif Kortun (Curator, Istanbul Biennale, Director, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre, Istanbul) and Roger M. Buergel (Professor, Curator and Artistic Director of Documenta 12).
Some of the controversial questions raised by curator Roger Buergel in his talk which preceded this panel were taken up again in this discussion, specifically:
a) in what way is a localised cultural action appropriated by a global art system? The case of the mythical show Tucumán Arde that took place in Rosário, Argentina, in the late 60s in the context of the first Bienal de Arte de Vanguardia;
b) the controversy around the role of the museum today, instigated by Buergels statement that institutions should prioritise their own collections and relate those collections to other contexts and museums instead of relying on raising funds through temporary exhibitions.
In general, however, the debate was around the central and unavoidable themes of socio-cultural dislocation, deterritorialisation and multiculturalism. It touched on issues such as the contradictions and ambiguities that characterise those processes (which are particularly traumatic for peripheral artists and cultural contexts), and the dichotomies centre/periphery, civilisation/barbarism, ruler/ruled, coloniser/colonised (issues that were further discussed by the Professor of Cultural Anthropology Walter D. Mignolo on the following session Museums in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity)
The panel session started with Zdenka Badovinak, who showed some concern about the question of the local in relation to her own hometown, Ljubljana, Slovenia (Manifesta 3 host city). Robert Fleck mentioned that Badovinac is not only a curator on the move, but also a professional who articulates the relationship between her own city and other contemporary contexts, and who promotes a creative encounter of artistic ideas, proposals and possibilities always taking the specificity and power of artworks as a departure point for her exhibitions.
Badovinac raised an issue that would come up on various occasions during the day the problem of universal artistic standards and methods, a paradigm that often doesnt suit, or clashes with, local contexts. She mentioned the concept of modernity as an example of this. This fundamental notion in curatorship is understood in a different manner in Eastern Europe and, paradoxically, it is largely attributed by the rest of the world to the artistic output from this region. Western modernity coincided with the communist period in our countries. But modernity still hasnt been understood and integrated into the Eastern European context.
The curator then showed some images of a project she organised, Democracies, which dealt with the creation and/or documentation of informal parallel systems. According to her, from a Western point of view, these systems refer to a pre-modern universe. At stake here was the relationship between official aesthetics (represented by museums and the institutionalised art system) and a parallel aesthetics (represented, above all,
by the media).
Next, the Australian curator Lynne Cook, from the Dia Art Foundation, New York, described a recent performance by Marina Abramovic outside the Guggenheim Museum, where the artist kept turning around for almost seven hours with her arms wide open to salute the visitors. Abramovic summoned the power of art its history and memory - and symbolically transformed the audience into her subjects. According to Lynne Cooke, thousands of people witnessed the performance. I was really struck by the number of participants, and that was useful for me to analyse the audiences behaviour nowadays. I think they all came there less because of the event itself but in an attempt to try to get involved in a collective memory of art, and this is very characteristic of the moment we are living, said Cooke. We cannot lose sight that it is the artists of the present who teach us to see and to reinterpret the art of the past. For it is through them that art lives today. At the end of her talk, Cooke took the opportunity to refer explicitly to Roger Buergels comments: This art of the present takes place in museums and institutions, as opposed to what the Documenta curator thinks.
Vasif Kortun, one of the curators of the last Istanbul Biennial and the director of the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, talked about the nature of curatorial work today and started his talk speaking about the double exile lived by independent curators. Once more, the theme of dislocation and regional differences was debated. In financial terms, it is a profession that doesnt ensure a future. Today, in the trade-oriented cultural world marked by relationships based on value and exchange, we have witnessed quite debatable practices from our colleagues especially in the US and in Europe, where the field of contemporary art is becoming a stage for relationships between the public and the private sectors that are far from being transparent, affirmed Kotrun.
Once the mediator opened the discussion to the audience, the first comment came from Argentinean collector Jorge Helft, who was dissatisfied with the inclusion of the show Tucumán Arde in the exhibition organised by curator Roger Buergel. Helft remarked on the importance of the project, a historical reference for twentieth century Argentinean art which was not restricted to the limitations of the exhibition space or to the number of days it remained open, but one which expanded itself to the relationship with the community of workers in Tucumán who were being negatively affected by governmental policies.
Ana Longoni, an art historian and researcher at the Department of Philosophy and Literature of the University of Buenos Aires, echoed the collector by saying that there was indeed integration between the artists and the population. The idea was actually to abandon the artistic milieu and to be confronted by other realities, she said.
Buergel admitted that he actually took the work out of its original context, but stated that this is a legitimate act. I am very fond of this project, but I believe that it is right to reinsert ideas in new contexts, in a productive way and with a clear proposal. At Documenta my aim is to propose an integral experience, investing in the relations between politics, on the one hand, and subjectivity and aesthetic experience, on the other.
The German curator, who was harshly questioned by the audience, also said: The average number of visitors to the Documenta is 650,000 people, eighty per cent of which are German, and for most of them, this is the only contemporary art show that they will see in a year. I wish to emphasize an art exhibitions potential to reconnect art and audiences.
Vasif Kortun returned to the controversial position taken by Buergel on the issue of museums investing in their own collections. He defended the possibility of creating temporary exhibitions and asked: Where would we install art exhibitions if not in museums?. Buergel replied: I believe Ive been misunderstood. I am suggesting that museums allocate resources to build a collection and not only respond to the market demand for exhibitions. Then they will be able to educate the audiences, and also avoid becoming hostages of the international curators mafia who always come up with the same artists.
Robert Fleck ended the panel discussion by saying that, although the plenary evaded the official theme (a discussion around contemporary curatorial methods), four different lines of thought were presented and they all pointed towards the same conclusion: that both art itself and art exhibitions are about thinking and thought, and so should be museums.
(by Fernando Oliva)
Translation: hì-fen translation solutions
Proofreading: Anne Cunningham
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