Contents

State of the ArtJohan Pousette & Petra Johansson

Whatever Happened to New Institutionalism?Jonas Ekeberg

Gallery as Community: Art, Education, PoliticsMarijke Steedman

Jam Today or Jam Tomorrow?Sarah Thelwall

Balancing on a Thin Line Mathilde Villeneuve

Some Locations and Locomotions for Contemporary ArtMick Wilson

ReflectionNils Olsson

Biographies

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In October 2013 more than 150 contemporary professionals met in Gothenburg for two days of discussion about the role of art in society and new institutional and curatorial methods. Focusing particularly on small and medium-sized art institutions, speakers at the confer-ence showed how exhibition locations today are increasingly becoming platforms for collective discussion of society, politics and imperative topical issues. Lectures and discussions contributed to this conference, which was entitled “State of the Art”. Our ambition was to focus on art institu-tions and to discuss the possibilities and challenges that these insti-tutions face today. Several of the speakers looked at how institutions can navigate in a new landscape of neoliberal ideas, social unrest and societal transformation in which even the aesthetic values are being redefined. Based on the notion that contemporary art can provide an impor-tant free zone for experimentation, discussion and critical activities, we wanted to look more closely at the dynamic between artistic praxis, institutions and society. Can politics, the wide spectrum of culture and artists collaborate to achieve processes that develop the potential of art and communication with the public? How do we challenge what exists

State of the ArtIntroduction

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today, and how do we construct new articulations for the future? Constructively critical voices like Jonas Ekeberg (formerly editor of Kunstkritikk) pleaded for more provocative exhibitions and won-dered how free institutions actually are in relation to the powers that be. The head of an art institution should have the same wide-ranging mandate as an editor in chief, Ekeberg proposed. The idea that artistic content should remain at arm’s length from political decision makers originated with John Maynard Keynes when he was building up the Arts Council in the United Kingdom after the end of World War II. Independent experts and representatives of the art world judge quality, which enables politicians or paid officials to support the arts without controlling them. This has been a guiding principle in Western European cultural policies ever since. But many people today feel that this fundamental relationship between the art institution and the commissioning body has changed. Swedish art institutions display frustration and a sense of resignation in the face of the paradigmatic shift in which management by paid officials is in-creasing, while elements that can be measured quantitatively are given more weight than long-term qualitative effects. The initial issue considered at the conference concerned what had happened to the “New Institutionalism” movement that had sought in the 1990s to achieve radical changes and a redefinition of the institu-tions’ view of art, the public, hierarchies and the white cube of the exhi-bition space. Even if Ekeberg claimed that this development had gone astray, the question was answered hopefully, not least by the represen-tatives of Les Laboratoires in the financially and socially challenged Parisian suburb of Aubervilliers. The operation there is characterized by social and political commitment, an alternative institutional meth-odology and open processes involving public and artists. Mathilde Villeneuve claimed that even though their activities require a constant balancing act, Les Laboratoires is a free institution. In the context of the UK, there have been massive cutbacks in gov-ernment support for the arts in recent years. Several of the speakers at the conference contributed their experience of the British cultural cli-mate. Marijke Steedman from the Whitechapel Gallery in east London works with socially engaging projects beyond the walls of the institu-

tion. That the institution itself can take on the artist’s role in initiat-ing projects gave rise to discussion, but perhaps this just illustrates the cross-border shift between different roles that is currently taking place. Marketing and finance consultant Sarah Thelwall presented prac-tical advice as to how smaller public art institutions can improve their financial situation without compromising their operation. Thelwall maintains that assets are not just a matter of money, but also of welfare and societal values. She notes that we live in difficult times. If we are not able to explain what we are doing we shall never be able to uphold the needs of the small organizations. Her views gave rise to questions as to how willingly we should embrace the language of the market when we discuss the value of art. Mick Wilson also has experience of the cultural sphere in the UK. He is originally from Ireland but today he heads the Valand Academy in Gothenburg. His contribution, entitled “Art School on a Train”, was as much an artistic performance as it was a contribution to the role, place and format of the public institution. The “State of the Art” conference was rounded off by a series of reflections by Nils Olsson who teaches literature at Gothenburg Uni-versity, and Meira Ahmemulic who is an artist and writer. From a sub-jective perspective they reflected on what the conference had given them and on what issues it had raised. Meira Ahmemulic aroused, with a range of critical examples, questions about the role that artists have and are given in the discussion of the new art institution. She also noted that both Akademi Valand and Les Laboratoires have problems with in excluding. Nils Olsson, who also contributes a paper to this documen-tation, noted for example the almost too rapid willingness shown by people from the cultural sphere and from the academic world to em-brace new perspectives and goals. Is it, in fact, the case that institutions censor themselves? The conference suggested that it might well be the small and medi-um-sized players who, together with self-organized initiatives, have the greatest potential for development today. That they are capable of be-ing something different and an inspiration to others. The rapid change in society enables art to shoulder the role of an important, discursive platform and to give space to a critical discussion. The result of such processes can be of real value to society in the long term, and today’s

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evaluative systems could pay greater attention to the fact that value can be produced in many different ways and should be measured over the entire lifetime of an institution rather than a single annual budget. There is a real need for dialogue about the expectations of politicians and the public, and the autonomous position of art and its institutions. And if we consider art as an ecosystem it becomes evident that each single element must be considered as equally important to the develop-ment of the whole.

Johan Pousette Contemporary Art Manager Riksutställningar/Swedish Exhibition Agency

Petra Johansson Art Consultant Kultur i Väst Västra Götalandsregionen

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Introduction

Ten years have passed since the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) launched the first of its Verksted publications, a pamphlet titled New Institutionalism, discussing the emerging field of experimental art institutions in northern Europe.1 However, only four years later the German curator Nina Möntmann was ready to declare the movement over, or, in her words, “cut down to size”2. In order to describe this “rise and fall” of new institutionalism, one would ordinarily follow either a longer or a shorter line of histori-cal precedents. The longer one reaches back to Alexander Dorner’s Landesmuseum in Hannover in the twenties, as his progressive and experimental museum policy put him in direct opposition to the Nazi party. This timeline also encompasses projects like André Malraux’s Museum without Walls, started in the forties, and Pontus Hultén’s radi-cal exhibitions for Moderna Museet in the sixties. The shorter timeline starts in the late eighties or early nineties, with the fall of romantic or conservative postmodernism and the re-emer-gence of the social, experimental and intermedial working methods of the sixties. This development paved the way for the rise of the indepen-dent curator as a central figure on the art scene of the early nineties.

Whatever Happened to New Institutionalism?Jonas Ekeberg

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The Nineties

The art of the nineties has been described in a variety of ways, but Peter Weibel’s term “Kontext Kunst” from 1993 is as good as any.3 This was an art that fed off its surroundings, either the art institution itself or a larger, societal situation. Institutional critique, relational art and neoconceptual art could all be grouped under Weibel’s heading, and the exhibition as site and event was a particularly important object of investigation. Towards the turn of the century, the curators of the social and experimental art exhibitions of the nineties were ready to move from temporary projects to working with more established institutions. In this process they embarked on a project that seemed as novel as it was radical: to transform the art institution in the image of the contextual art of the decade. This meant transforming art centres and museums into institutions of critique and auto-critique. It meant – for some – “following the artists” and creating a moving and flexible institution, one that would no longer stand in opposition to artistic experiments and interventions but facilitate and underscore these very experi-ments.4 It also meant – for others – a turn towards the political, either in terms of community involvement, capitalist critique or both. Charles Esche put it succinctly when he became director of Rooseum in Malmö in 2001: “Now, the term ‘art’ might be starting to describe that space in society for experimentation, questioning and discovery that religion, science and philosophy have occupied sporadically in former times. It has become an active space rather than one of passive observation. Therefore the institutions to foster it have to be part community centre, part labo-ratory and part academy, with less need for the established showroom function. They must also be political in a direct way, thinking through the consequences of our extreme free market policies.”5

It was this amalgam of artistic, curatorial and political working with and through institutions that was dubbed “New Institutionalism” in the publication by OCA in 2003.

Different Terms

New institutionalism was contested right from the beginning. In the very first publication Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt raised the concern that the experiments run by the institutions would simply lead to exploita-tion of artists, and to “disarming the radical potential of the work”.6 The Austrian theorist Gerald Raunig thought that “New Institutional-ism” sounded too much like “New Public Management” and proposed his own term, “instituent practices”7. Like Gordon Nesbitt, Raunig advocated a radicalism from below. Gordon Nesbitt’s model was the artist, Raunig’s model was “the multitude”, as envisioned by political theorists Hardt and Negri in their seminal volume Empire. But they were both sceptical of the political agency of the institution itself. The Spanish museum curator Jorge Ribalta and Rooseum’s direc-tor Charles Esche looked at the phenomenon from the inside of the institution. Ribalta had done important activist work at the Barcelona Museum for Contemporary Art (MACBA) that he referred to as “new institutionality”. Esche later talked of his various projects as “experi-mental institutionalism”. They both maintained a belief in the politi-cal potential of the art institution.

A Nordic Detour

Before we start discussing the said decline, I would like to propose another historical line leading up to new institutionalism. Circling in on the Nordic region, what would this narrative look like if we start-ed with the establishment of a Nordic public sphere for art in the 19th century? For this purpose, we can use Jürgen Habermas’ model of the bourgeois public sphere and note that the early phase of that sphere represented a mixing of royal and democratic institutions.8 Our national art collections and art academies are the prime examples, of course. The high point of this early phase was probably the opening of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm in 1866, where art works were liter-ally shipped by boat from the royal mansions around Stockholm to the museum, away from the confines of the court into the openness of the

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public. As it happened, the opening of the Nationalmuseum coincided with a great exhibition of Scandinavian art which marked the starting point for a long history of more or less official Nordic exhibitions that, in varying degrees, would shape the Nordic public sphere of art for the next century. Following the eventual liberation of the public sphere from the roy-al court, various oppositions formed towards the bourgeoisie. Signifi-cant opposition came specifically from the labour movement and, in our case, from artists. A turning point was the Nordic artists’ meeting in Gothenburg in 1881. The first social democratic demonstrations had been held in Stockholm earlier that year, and the artists used the same energy to revolt against the restrictions of the academies. The effect was felt in the years to come in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Helsinki, but it was most immediate in Oslo, where the artists boycotted the art union’s annual sales exhibition the same year and formed their own exhibition, the annual fall exhibition, the year after. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a Nordic avant-garde emerged, an avant-garde initially supported by private collectors. Gradually, however, modern Nordic art was embraced by governmen-tal forces and consolidated through the establishment of new institu-tions such as Liljevalchs Konsthall, a municipal gallery, in Stockholm, opened in 1913, the Helsinki Art Hall, opened in 1928 and Kunstnernes Hus, opened in 1930. All these institutions were the result of various private-public constellations and thus formed the early phase of a wel-fare-based cultural policy. After the Second World War, welfare programmes for artists and new, welfare-based institutions arrived in rapid succession. Most of them were national in scope, like the National Touring Exhibitions in both Sweden and Norway, but some were also Nordic, like the biannual Nordic Exhibitions from 1945, the Nordic Pavilion in Venice from 1962, The Nordic Art Centre in 1978 and so on. This is the point at which government policies really start to become part of the life and structure of the Nordic art scene.

Crisis or Possibility

For Jürgen Habermas, this state intervention in the public sphere represented a crisis. He saw state power corrupting free, unconstrained debate among equal contenders, a kind of dialogue that was founda-tional to his conception of the public sphere. In the Nordic countries, however, I would like to propose that these years after the Second World War represent the high peak of the public sphere, at least in the visual arts. This was a situation where various private and public national and inter-Nordic voices could engage in a debate about the meaning of modern art. The institutions formed a crucial part of this sphere and were granted autonomy and freedom to a hitherto unknown extent. A central example of the relative freedom of the post-war era was Moderna Museet in Stockholm under the directorship of Pontus Hultén. Hultén was able to unite an international avant-garde with a general audience in a unique way during his thirteen years at the museum, from 1960 to 1973. The negotiations relating to the Nordic Pavilion in Venice since 1962 have included both art professionals and artists as well as government representatives; a seemingly democratic setup, even if some of the artistic choices were rather conservative. In addition, various counter publics formed, for example in the form of the Experimental Art School in Copenhagen, started in 1961. The peaceful calm of this social democratic order was broken in 1968 when the Swedish part of the Nordic pavilion in Venice under the directorship of Olle Granath made itself available as a shelter for radi-cal political activists. At this instance, a new kind of critical activity was acted out on the Nordic art scene, the freedom to negate the ex-hibition as such, in face of societal change. However, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs protested. “We are not there to change the world”, they stated in an internal memo, disclosed some twenty years later in a thesis. “We want value for our money”, the Norwegian MFA stated.9

In our model, this politics of opposition represents an extension of the public sphere that is a true test for the social democratic welfare state. Since the thirties, this welfare state had shown that it could extend the privileges of public life to a historically high number of citizens, but

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was it also able to allow the same citizens and their institutions, the privilege of dissent? On the Nordic art scene, this was not really tested by the art institu-tions in the years after 1968. The radical political impulses seem to have taken refuge in the fight for artists’ rights, while the institution experi-enced a return to order. Naturally, there were exceptions, but generally, no Nordic museum director would attempt the same kind of radical programming as Pontus Hultén had done in the 1960s.

Professionalization

On the other hand, the 1970s and 1980s were a period of professional-ization. During the sixties, the official Nordic art exhibitions were still run by juries the size of a classroom, in the manner of the Salon of the nineteenth century. This institution finally saw reform in 1976 when, for the first time, the exhibition was commissioned by a single person, Staffan Cullberg. Subsequently the Nordic biennial was relaunched as Borealis in 1983, directed by the Finnish curator Maaretta Jaukkuri for several years to come. Other parts of the Nordic art world also saw the new role of the curator take shape, and people like Lars Nittve at Rooseum in Sweden and Per Hovdenakk at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Norway were able to produce exhibitions and run institutions in accordance with their own artistic vision and in dialogue with the international art scene. These were important developments within the limits of the late modern or postmodern art discourse, where politics as such was still an aspect of the artworks themselves, and not a part of the operations of the institution. The turning point in this narrative, leading up to the advent of new institutionalism, came in the early nineties, when a new genera-tion of Nordic artists, critics and curators emerged and brought back the political dimension of the sixties. This generation – we could per-haps call it a Nordic neo-avant-garde – countered the hegemony of the late or postmodern Nordic art institution. At first, this new art scene formed its own galleries, project spaces and mini-institutions, but soon the critics and curators of the new generation – most of them born in

the late sixties and early seventies – were ready to take on more central roles, first as critics in leading newspapers, then as curators and soon also as directors of museums and art centres.

Another Institution

This leads us to consider the epitome of the Nordic art sphere and new institutionalism alike, The Nordic Art Centre. This institution was es-tablished in 1978 in order to foster collaboration, produce exhibitions and disseminate information about visual art in the Nordic countries. It could be seen as the consolidation of the Nordic art scene that was initiated more than a hundred years earlier in Stockholm in 1866. After building up its activities through the better part of the eight-ies – including the biennial Borealis and Siksi: The Nordic Art Journal – The Nordic Art Centre faced a crisis in the nineties, as both Sweden and Finland joined the European union and had less interest in the Nordic public sphere. The Art Centre somehow survived the crisis and was renamed the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art in 1997. The new institution made its mark with the first Nordic conference on curatorial strategies in its opening year, and from there it developed in an experimental and political direction, which culminated during its final years with projects such as Capital – It Fails Us Now (2005), Popu-lism (2005), Self-Organisation/Countereconomic Strategies (2006) and Rethinking Nordic Colonialism (2006). For a while, NIFCA carried both the formal experiments and the radical politics of the “new” institution to such an extent that director Cecilia Gedin, claimed that “one can actually say that we are working in a utopian art institution!”10. However, Gedin must have been well aware of the meaning of the word “utopia” – the place that does not ex-ist – as she went on to declare, in the next sentence, that the institution was about to be closed down. This happened in 2006. The same year, the Rooseum in Malmö was also closed down, as Charles Esche had failed to convince the politicians of Malmö to extend their support for the art centre. So, it seems as though the two most important “new” institutions of

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the Nordic countries were shut down, for a mix of political or econom-ic reasons. And, if we look at larger institutions like Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Kiasma in Helsinki, the National Museum in Oslo or the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen, it seems as though these institutions have been tidied up and streamlined, made more professional, but also less likely to experiment with their institu-tional structure. Indeed, Nina Möntmann was right in declaring that new institutionalism had experienced a decline, at least in Scandinavia.

Instrumentality

Why was this so? Why were the curator-directors of the early zeroes not able to pull off what Pontus Hulten had managed to achieve forty years earlier; fulfilling the political obligations of the institution while also maximising its aesthetic and political potential? And why has the welfare state been less than willing to maintain its support for art insti-tutions that have acted politically; a mode of action which is so vital for the public sphere? I would like to propose three possible, interlinked answers to this question: Firstly, the late welfare state seems to have retracted into a more defensive position in terms of cultural policy. Pontus Hultén could rely on the freedom he was awarded within the public sphere of the sixties. His professionalism granted it and he was able to popularize a radical position. Today, such an open and pluralistic situation seem to have been replaced by an instrumental, minutely controlled cultural policy that limits the freedom of its agents, sometimes through well-intended programmes directed towards “new audiences”, sometimes through restructuring or merging institutions in order to streamline their activi-ties, and sometimes through bureaucratic regimes of control that place professionals in subordinate positions. Not all institutions affected by New Public Management were closed down. Many of them live on, albeit perhaps, in Möntmann’s words, “put in their place like subordinate teenagers”. The Interna-tional Artists Studio Programme in Sweden, Iaspis, offers perhaps the clearest example. This was an institution that was able to play a signifi-

cant role in the late nineties and early zeroes, but which today seems completely controlled by its governing agency. According to an article published by the online journal Kunstkritikk last year, any political programme by Iaspis must be “balanced” and all programmes must be approved by a controlling head of administration and, subsequently, by the board.11 It would never, of course, have been possible for Pontus Hultén to work under such conditions. Secondly, and related to the first, the bonds between contemporary art and a general audience seem to have been weakened. The fascina-tion and curiosity with the art of the sixties seem to have been replaced with scepticism, and this scepticism reaches well into our governing bodies. This has given rise to an impatience with the procedures and theories and complicated works of contemporary art that underpin all the micro-decisions of limitations and control that we have spoken of. A third factor may be a certain mismatch between the stated ambi-tions and the actual outcome of the projects themselves. On the one hand, Rooseum and NIFCA – like Moderna Museet in the sixties – uti-lized the rhetoric of community involvement and political debate. But Rooseum and NIFCA were never able to popularize their programmes. The idea of contemporary art as a laboratory or a model was clear and evident to the art scene, but not readily accepted by the general audi-ence, the media or the politicians. In the end there was also a somewhat declining curve of interest among Rooseum’s and NIFCA’s core audi-ences. I remember specially the NIFCA project Opacity in which it was argued that the art institution could make use of a “tactical necessity of disappearance”12. This was well argued within the context of the his-tory of institutional critique, but as NIFCA was struggling for survival it seemed almost self-defeating to launch this kind of project.

Small, Medium, Large

NIFCA and Rooseum were closed down six years ago. Where does this leave us today? In order to understand the legacy of new institutional-ism and the current situation, I think it is productive to think in terms of size:

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Small: On the one hand, artist-run and alternative galleries contin-ue their exploration of the exhibition medium, relatively unaffected by either the rise or the fall of new institutionalism. If there is a relation, it is negative: when the larger institutions took over the seemingly experi-mental working methods of the artist-run spaces, the latter retracted to the gallery space and to object-based work in order to retain the core energy and independence of artistic practice. Rather than reforming the institution, they turn their backs on the it.13

Large: Some of the working methods of the new institutionalism have become part of the programme of larger institutions, such as the national art museums. Reading rooms, critical discussions, com-munity involvement and off-site projects seem to be recurrent strate-gies for these institutions today. However, even if they adopt some of these strategies, these major institutions very rarely become institu-tions of critique and auto-critique. A few attempts have been made, but the general tendency in Europe and in the Nordic countries over the last decade has been towards securing the institutions financially and politically, not towards institutional experiments. Medium: This leaves us with the medium-sized institution, which is the true testing ground for New Institutionalism. Here, it seems as though there are two contradicting tendencies at play. On the one hand, there has truly been a decline, and the closing of NIFCA, Rooseum, the Danish Contemporary Art Foundation as well as the weakening of Iaspis in Stockholm and Frame in Helsinki are signs of this. On the other hand, many of the curators of the late nineties still have a hand at directing mid-sized institutions. Examples include Maria Lind at Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm, Åsa Nacking at Lunds Konsthall, Jakob Fabricius at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, Sanne Kofod Olsen at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde and Will Bradley at Kunsthall Oslo. However these mid-sized venues are currently run in a more balanced manner than was the case at the peak of new institutionalism. For better or worse, they combine traditional and progressive programmes with a balanced relation to their funding partners. They have, in short, become less “experimental” and more “institutional”. The question is whether our publicly funded art institutions should

be satisfied with their new, “balanced”, situation or if, once again, they could and should become institutions of critique and auto-critique. In my opinion, securing the very existence of these institutions has the highest priority. There is nothing less radical and experimental than a closed institution. However, on the grounds of a balanced organi-zational model, there should still be a political potential in these in-stitutions. For this potential to be realized these institutions need to start taking risks again. But they also need the sustained support and commitment from politicians, artists, critics and a general audience. It is now more than ever important that we recognise these institutions’ invaluable contribution to public life, and that we voice our support, across various formal and informal forums. The technological means to do so are more present than ever and what the art institution needs is, first and foremost, signs that people care. This is also the beginning of a new politics of the art institution.

1 Jonas Ekeberg, ed. New Institutionalism. Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art Norway, 2003.2 Nina Möntmann, “The Rise and Fall of New Institutionalism”, Transversal 04/07, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0407/moentmann/en.3 Peter Weibel. Kontext Kunst – The Art of the 90s. Graz: Neue Galerie im Künstlerhaus Graz, 1993.4 Maria Lind. “Learning from Art and Artists”. In Selected Maria Lind Writing. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.5 Charles Esche. “What’s the Point of Institutions Like the Rooseum”, in Rooseum Provisorium 1, 2001.6 Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt. “Harnessing the Means of Production”. In Jonas Ekeberg (ed.). New Institutionalism. Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art Norway, 2003, p. 85.7 Gerald Raunig. “Instituent Practices – Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming”, in Transversal 01/0, http://eipcp.net/transversal/0106/raunig/en.8 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. London: Polity Press, 1989 (1962).9 UD-63C26a: Report from a meeting of the biennale council, Copenhagen, 21.4.1971. Quoted from Anne Milnes, Norsk deltakelse på Venezia-biennalen (Oslo: Universitetet i Oslo, Institutt for arkeologi, kunsthistorie og numismatikk , 1996) p. 76.10 Cecilia Gedin: “The Utopian Institution?” in Nina Möntmann, ed.: Art and its Institutions, (Helsinki/London, NIFCA/Black Dog Publishing, 2006), p. 6.11 Joel Tunström: “Vad har hänt med Iaspis?”, Kunstkritikk 12.12.12. http://www.kunstkritikk.no/artikler/vad-har-hant-med-iaspis/12 Möntmann. Art and its Institutions – Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations. 101.13 See, for example, a statement from the group behind the artist-run gallery NoPlace in Oslo. Kunstkritikk 17.1.11, http://www.kunstkritikk.no/nyheter/en-satellitt-i-oslogate/

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Introduction

As Curator for Community Programmes at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London I work within a large Education Team and together we programme projects, research, events, publications, workshops, courses and sometimes exhibitions. I have been asked to think about how ‘New Institutionalism’ (a curatorial term first coined in the 1990s) relates to my work in a contemporary art gallery in the field of com-munity and education. To begin with, I will try to describe the traits of New Institutionalism, and will then consider how I think the White-chapel Gallery has responded to this curatorial field. I will claim that it was evident within the practices of the education department but I will also argue that we can see evidence of similar practices taking place in gallery education as far back as the 1970s. In order to set a context it is useful to look at the essay Temple/White Cube/Laboratory from 2004 by Iwona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery. Blazwick uses the history and evolution of the Whitechapel Gallery to reflect on “the way exhibitions and their spaces offer an index of the conditions of spectatorship and how they have evolved over a century”. The Gallery was founded in 1901, in an area of

Gallery as Community: Art, Education, PoliticsMarijke Steedman

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abject poverty, by Canon Samuel Barnett and his wife Henrietta who were both early Christian Socialists. Blazwick describes how the Gal-lery was initially conceived as a temple to art and knowledge and was presented as a ’gift’ to the people of east London. “The gallery and its exhibitions were conceived in instrumentalist terms, to provide moral guidance and redemption for a largely illiterate public. Furthermore this public space … was seen as a critical tool in neutralizing class con-flict and delivering social cohesion.” She goes on to highlight 1958 as the time when the gallery envi-ronment had fully evolved into that of the white cube. Here Blazwick quotes Brian O’Doherty “A gallery is constructed along laws as rigor-ous as those for building a medieval church. The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light… The art is free, as the saying used to go, ‘to take on its own life’.” By 2004, when Iwona Blazwick wrote this text, she was describ-ing the Gallery in terms of the laboratory. “The challenge for the 21st century is to acknowledge that exhibition spaces and systems of dis-play are neither natural nor neutral... The challenge for the future will be to maintain a sense of where and what the institution is, in terms of its own location, history and audiences, and yet to be open to new artistic perspectives on the present and the past.” Rather than shed-ding each successive manifestation of the institution, it’s more likely that new approaches become attached to the whole, with different approaches existing in parallel and sometimes in opposition within the complex web of conditions within and around an institution.

Describing New Institutionalism

I personally got my first sense of New Institutionalism whilst visiting Edinburgh in 1998. The friend I was visiting was part of a group called Proto-academy, a group of mainly artists and students committed to collective activity and communal reading. I really enjoyed attending one of their meetings. They had a strong interest in participatory art practices and addressing society as material. The group met within

Edinburgh College of Art. Their methodology was exciting at the time as it seemed to be searching for a new context for art, which was neither gallery nor academy. The friend I had visited then went off to study at the Rooseum in Malmo. I now understand that the Proto-academy was initiated by the curator and writer Charles Esche. In 2001 he observed: “Now, the term ‘art’ might be starting to describe that space in society for experimentation, questioning and discovery that religion, science and philosophy have occupied sporadi-cally in former times. It has become an active space rather than one of passive observation. Therefore the institutions to foster it have to be part community centre, part laboratory and part academy with less need for the established showroom function.” The writer and curator Claire Doherty pinpoints 1997 (the year before my trip to Edinburgh) as a watershed in the development of New Institutionalism. Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics was published in France in 1997 and that year Skulptur Projekte Münster saw a big shift towards socially engaged or relational practices which placed them in a more mainstream curatorial arena. At the heart of new institutionalism was a continuation of the processes of institutional critique of the 1970s, through which all aspects of the institution were open to debate including timeframes, distribution, programming and staffing. Work was sometimes no lon-ger framed around clear start and end points. Participation, dialogue and process were prioritized over object making. Art need no longer take the shape of an exhibition. Programming became reactive to situ-ation both inside and outside the institution and not impeded by the physical limitations of a building. The shape of the New Institution had to be one which could accommodate open-ended conversations, one to one social encounters, group discussion, libraries, and curricula, as well as providing opportunities to make and eat food, workshops, cinema and so on.

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The Street

I developed The Street at the Whitechapel Gallery from 2006. It’s clear in retrospect that the project was one of a number of moments when the Gallery tested some of the methodologies associated with New Institutionalism. I arrived at Whitechapel Gallery as the Curator: Community Programmes in 2006. From 2007 – 2009 the building was partially closed as we embarked on a major expansion of the Gallery. From 2008 I set-up a new community programme called The Street. This took the place of the existing programme which had, till then, carefully and very effectively targeted particular groups to take part in artist projects usually designed by the curator and led by an artist both in the gallery and offsite. Projects usually had carefully defined social or educational objectives. The project emerged towards the end of a period of generous state and private funding for the arts in the UK due to neo-liberal cultural policy which, for more than a decade, promoted the role culture can play in social and physical regeneration. We had grown used to funding which came with prerequisites for social change, not least social co-hesion, greater economic wellbeing and so on. In the early documents where I started to shape ideas for The Street I propose a programme of new art responding to the local area. I talk about creating opportuni-ties for people living and working in east London to encounter art on their own terms beyond the site of the Gallery. I talk about inviting art-ists from outside of the situation to develop projects closely responding to real political situations and issues. The project took a very critical approach to our own institution: Who defines communities? Are we part of a community? What is the motive of the institution in bringing this work into a public sphere? For The Street we invited artists from all over the world to propose new works responding to one road, Wentworth Street, local to the Gal-lery. The road leads from the main financial district of London to a residential street, mostly comprised of social housing. We undertook much research into the street including natural history, the history of particular properties on the street, the local economy, and local orga-nizations. Artists were invited to spend a lot of time researching and

meeting people. We invited ten artists and art groups to propose new works. The artists were Minerva Cuevas, Canal (Anna Colin, Matthew Darbyshire, Gareth Jones, Sarah McCrory and Olivia Plender), Jens Haaning, Henry VIII’s Wives, Bernd Krauss, Melanie Manchot, Eileen Perrier, Public Works Shimabuku and Nedko Solakov. In parallel to this were writers commissioned to reflect on the project including Lars Bang Larsen and Clare Cumberlidge from General Public Agency. The curatorial structure was remarkably open. In our brief to artists we never asked for socially engaged or participatory projects. Artists were given geographic and temporal constraints but we did not place any expectations on them about who they should be work-ing with. The project was built around the belief that socially engaged artists would find issues and communities with which to connect. We believed that by allowing artists to shape their own projects and follow their own lines of research we were bringing art closer to ‘real life’ and that our programme would be more politically engaged as a result. We set up an offsite project headquarters which was offered to art-ists as a space to be used for projects. Over the duration of the project it was used as an office, shop, archive, ice cream parlour, lottery head-quarters, workshop space, library and exhibition space. There were satellite events and performances which aimed to create noise and dis-ruption to the central programme of artist commissions. The structure of the project now reads as a test-bed for considering ‘community’ on different platforms and in different situations. Looking back at the institution again, we proposed to change the internal staffing structure which separated the exhibition and educa-tion teams. For a time this worked. Exhibition curators worked on participatory projects for the first time. We all learned a lot from our different areas of expertise. Education curators had much experience of thinking about participation which exhibitions curators were grap-pling with for the first time in the wake of relational art practices. We were heading towards ‘integrated programming’ which would have been the ultimate legacy of the New Institution: a gallery where pro-cess, education, exhibition and engagement are seen as concerns ex-tending throughout the entire gallery programme.

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New Institutionalism at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1978?

Gallery as Community: Art, Education, Politics was published last year. Among other topics it explored similarities in how contemporary art galleries were choosing to deal with ideas about community and participation. The Street shared many traits with projects in other gal-leries including Art in Rose Hill at Modern Art Oxford, One Mile at Collective in Edinburgh and Communal Knowledge at The Showroom in London. Clearly something happened to art and curatorial practice and theory in the late 1990’s which filtered into art institutions and made it possible to propose the kind of visionary, socially engaged projects we have seen described at the Whitechapel Gallery, Collective, The Showroom and Modern Art Oxford. It might be that these proj-ects were influenced by New Institutionalism. To counter that rather neat conclusion I’m going to present an example which suggests that, in the UK, the practices attributed to New Institutionalism were already embedded in gallery education programmes long before the 1990’s. In 2003 Carmen Moersch (Director of the Institute for Art Edu-cation, Zurich University of the Arts) undertook some research in the Whitechapel Gallery Archive. She focused on one particular staff member whose work she said “had caused remarkable shifts in the gal-lery’s space and its role”. Martin Rewcastle was the first ever Education and Community Officer at the Whitechapel Gallery in the late 1970’s. While he wasn’t operating within the context of relational art practice that we know today, the community arts movement was extremely ac-tive in London at that time. Many artists leaving art colleges in the UK at that time rejected the route of commercial galleries and opted for the direct politically engaged territory of community art. This involved working collaboratively with communities, often to make murals or adventure playgrounds and acting as activists supporting communities with their own political concerns. Rewcastle’s strategies now read like a recipe for the New Institu-tion. His first action in his new role was to contact all the schools in the borough asking them how they could make use of the gallery and if it would be possible to collaborate. He invited project leaders from the USA to discuss artist-in-schools projects with peers in the UK.

His first strategy was to create dialogue beyond the structures of the Whitechapel Gallery. He employed artists to lead projects (at a time when the convention was to employ trained teachers) and the people he chose were politically engaged artists working locally such as the Artist Placement Group 8. He wrote about mural production in London and developed an events programme to contextualise the Mural Movement of the time, bringing the work into a critical field. He used the Gallery as a hub for producing leaflets, posters and events supporting local art-ists and local issues. Perhaps his most remarkable achievement was organizing the Tower Hamlets Art Project. Here he turned the entire gallery into a workshop space for one whole month. The Gallery presented community theatre, printmaking and locally based activities. Attached to this he began a public audio library which included recordings of events, discussions and concerts in many local languages which went on to be an accumu-lative resource at the Gallery. Rewcastle was reimagining the gallery as a space for process and art related directly to contexts outside of the Gallery. The exhibition Arts of Bengal also took place during Rewcastle’s time, but was curated by exhibitions curators. From a historical point of view it has been much celebrated but it also came up against much criticism at the time for not engaging with Bengali culture in the area local to the Whitechapel Gallery nor addressing the contemporary pol-itics of the textile industry. To put this dramatic difference in the gal-lery’s approach into perspective Moersch maintains: “The [gallery’s] programme hadn’t changed in terms of showing mainly monographic contemporary artists, yet it [now] also provided space for interventions, political debate and the active engagement of different local interest groups. Via its education programme it now included politically engaged and participatory artists who occasionally went on to display in the main Gallery”. Rewcastle’s work didn’t lead to a dramatic change in the curatorial practices of the Gallery but allowed for a new plurality of approach enabling closer links beyond the site of the Gallery and socially engaged art practices.

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The Curatorial Challenge

Concluding her article The Institution Is Dead! Long Live the Institu-tion! Contemporary Art and New Institutionalism Claire Doherty sug-gests that the galleries which have proved to be most successful today are “those institutions which seem to be balancing the visual experi-ence with a self-reflexive programme, and that have located themselves within a very specific social and cultural context. They work with artists on long-term projects and use their space creatively from club nights to performances and peer critiques. They have not eschewed the exhibition as a form of representation but rather find appropriate ways of combining conventional exhibitions with social spaces”. To explore this further it is useful to consider the Project Gallery at the White-chapel Gallery. This exhibition space was established in 2009 and is curated exclusively by the Education Team. The space is where projects curated by the Education Team are made visible to gallery visitors. It is unusual among galleries in London. In 2011 I worked on an exhibition in this space entitled Reclaim the Mural, which was commissioned through the Community Programme. Artist group The Work in Progress (Corinna Till, Benedict Drew, Emma Hart, Dean Kenning and Dai Jenkins) worked from 2010–13 to research the legacy of mural making in London. During the proj-ect they met with people living near murals, producers, commission-ers and conservers of murals. The project operated on many platforms and encompassed a publication, an exhibition, public discussions in housing estates, in street markets, and on the radio, as well as tours of murals throughout London, a blog and a new map of murals in London. We were all keen to share the project with gallery audiences through the Project Gallery. The artists grappled with ways to describe the huge amount of process-driven activity their project had encompassed but were resistant to documenting the project as an archive or record of participatory activity. For the final show the group produced a series of new collages in which they presented their research. While the instal-lation was well received publicly and triggered much debate, for those of us working on the project it didn’t quite communicate the breadth

of activity that had taken place during the project. The result felt like two projects with very different methodologies: white cube exhibition of new art works and offsite socially engaged project. Placing the project into this space seemed to reveal friction between the varying curatorial approaches operating within a single institution. Should we have made the decision not to bring Reclaim the Mural into the space of the gallery? Is it really feasible to work with people outside the institution in process-driven ways whilst producing a fixed visual outcome in an exhibition space? Or should we be eschewing the exhi-bition for other modes of sharing information such as publications, events, libraries, archives and so on? Ultimately we went on to produce a book for Reclaim the Mural and for me this conveyed more effectively the project in a public sphere. At the time of The Street programme, when the Gallery’s main exhibition spaces were closed, we experienced a uniquely exciting time during which the education programme was able to move from the ‘edge’ and into the centre of the organization’s curatorial programme. But it made me realize that sometimes being at the edge is a choice we make for the benefit of programming. At the centre we had pressure to think about our programme in relation to the art market, e.g. which artist project should coincide with Frieze Art Fair, and how to market the programme in more generic ways with mass appeal. It was harder to privilege local concerns and the needs of project participants or to create quiet closed moments, and we had to challenge art-world con-ventions such as alcoholic private views (inappropriate for projects in predominantly Muslim communities). It makes me realize that the shape of the programme at Whitechapel, a fusion of approaches from the New Institution to the White Cube and Temple with the lineage of community art and gallery education too, enables our programmes to be reactive to particular contexts and situations, artists and commu-nities. The challenge is in navigating this complex web of curatorial opportunity and retaining freedom to work in ways which are always appropriate to the ambitions of a project.

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Background and Context

Over the past twenty-five years there have been significant changes in the role and balance of public and private funding and investment in the UK. For the Cultural Industries and the ‘Arts’ in particular this is very challenging as there are few models for exploiting either a com-mercial output from an artistic production (e.g. CDs, ticket sales, etc.) nor are there opportunities to participate in the secondary market value (e.g. the resale of an artist’s work in an auction house). As public funding for the arts is reducing in real terms those organizations that have thus far relied on this route for the majority of their revenue will struggle to maintain financial stability and sustainability. Whilst some such organizations have diversified their funding profile, by and large, there is still a dependency on traditional grant-based mechanisms.Small visual arts organizations, such as the members of the Common Practice group, fulfil a crucial role in the arts ecology, commission-ing artistic works, developing new delivery formats and implementing highly participatory educational strategies. Their roles and methods of operation are focussed on collaboration and flexibility and their approaches are as vital to a healthy visual art ecosystem as those of

Jam Today or Jam Tomorrow?Sarah Thelwall

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larger institutions. An implicit understanding of the role and value of small organizations, both in the cultural sector and society as a whole, has long existed among arts professionals, yet it remains at odds with the metrics of government and many funders, whose measures for audience and income development serve to de-emphasize the potential of these organizations. The Cultural Industries create intellectual capital which has the capacity to be harnessed to deliver economic benefit to the organiza-tions, sectors and national GDP. Few non-profit arts organizations currently harness their intellectual capital in this manner. If they were to do so the direct economic benefits to the organization would be that of increased financial sustainability and the ability to invest in fur-ther activities of this type. The indirect economic, social and cultural benefits to the UK economy as well as to the delivery of the cultural goals, e.g. audience figures, would be significant.

How Do Small Visual Arts Organizations Differ?

In the Size Matters paper we looked at the business models of its mem-bers to see how they differ from the business models of larger orga-nizations. The nine members of the Common Practice group are all based in London and each has an average income of £250-300,000 per annum. Extensive financial analysis shows their level of dependence on core funding from Arts Council England (ACE) to be around 63 per cent. As the goal set by ACE is for organizations to be less than 50% funded by ACE this appears to be high. However a comparison with their larger institutional counterparts (such as members of Turning Point London, also known as the Visual Arts London Strategy group or VALS) demonstrates that the Common Practice members are only 0.9 per cent more dependent on public funding. Furthermore, it would seem that small organizations act as an unofficial support mechanism for larger organizations, by investing in risk-taking and the develop-ment of work; if the cost of this support were to be evaluated, the contribution of public funding to large organizations would, in fact, be higher than to smaller organizations. Added to this, small organiza-

tions have consistently lacked the investment in tangible assets that has been available to larger organizations. As a result, few small organiza-tions with a turnover of less than £1m per annum achieve any substan-tial income from their buildings, archive or collections. Those which do so tend to be renting out space to other organizations. They also lack income from shops or cafés and have very little access to sponsorship and donor income. An often unacknowledged resource is to be found in small organizations’ accretion of intangible assets. These include: individual and organizational expertise and experience, intellectual property, research skills, professional methods and processes. With ju-dicious investment, these hitherto unexploited assets – which organiza-tions generate naturally as part of core activities – could be converted into earned income, offering small organizations a potential safeguard against economic uncertainty. The intangible assets generated by small organizations as part of routine operations offer significant promise in this context. Combined with the tangible assets that even non-building based organizations possess – archives, for example – they represent an important, yet under-researched, area of enquiry. The advent of new digital modes of distribution, audience engagement and content remuneration in-crease the urgency of this project.

Looking in More Detail at How Assets are Accrued in an Organization

Traditionally the non-profit Cultural Industries have been grant-fund-ed on the basis of the cost of provision of cultural products and servic-es. The cost base for this revenue funding is usually directly connected to the labour costs involved. Capital funding is also on the basis of the cost of materials. This direct relationship between production costs and revenue may be termed ‘funding for first order activities’. First or-der returns are the residual value of first order (FO) activities such as individual and organizational expertise and experience, reputational development, cash surplus, goodwill, equipment, and resources owned. As an individual or organization grows in experience the rate of gen-

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eration of first order returns from first order activities may be expected to increase. For example, once an organization has been established and has achieved a regular grant-based income it is a relatively small addition to establish audience development or education programmes. It would not however be possible to set up such activities without a stable organizational base and core audience. First order activities are intrinsically linked to the human labour involved, therefore they are inherently non-scalable. The expertise of senior individuals is the core asset upon which success is based; it is unlikely that such resources as these can be replicated in line with the requirements of further growth within the sector. The increasing demands from growth upon a small number of team members risks their burn out and hampers further expansion via this model. Furthermore, the tacit knowledge and expe-rience gained from FO activities is held by individuals, not the orga-nization itself. The organization therefore risks losing these key assets unless it can establish development opportunities for them that nurture both individuals and organization. If the relationship between revenue and cost of production can be broken and, replaced with a connection between revenue and customer demand, then the bottleneck will be re-moved. In practice this will probably mean establishing a new method of production which enables scalable production to meet customer demand. For instance, instead of customers hiring a string quartet to play for them they can buy the CD. The former production method limits the total number of sales whereas the latter is scalable to meet the customer demand levels. Exhibition curation offers an alternate example – there is a difference between the initial curation of the show which requires a creative expert (the curator) to create the concept and pull the show together, but the on-going touring of the show requires little to no such expertise and is thus more scalable. This removal of the expert skills and ensuing scalability enables growth. The activities and returns generated in this model may be termed second order (SO). The inter-relationships between revenue, cost of production and customer demand are crucial to the capacity for growth. In a cost- related revenue model the only option for increasing the profit (or ‘surplus’) is to reduce the cost of production. Even if quality can be maintained there is only a very limited scope for profit growth in this

model. However if revenue growth is linked to customer demand then in the first instance price insensitive customers can be sought (the in-novators and early adopters) and as the products and services become more mainstream, then the number of customers can be increased. This inter-relationship between revenue and customer demand is much more open ended and does not suffer from the limitations of a revenue-cost of production connection. Typically this translation of expertise and experience from FO to SO activities and returns requires a change in the operating paradigm and a re-assessment of the underlying busi-ness model. This does not mean that all FO activities cease but that, more probably, SO activities are chosen and run in parallel. SO activi-ties and returns offer scalability, improved financial sustainability and greater distribution and reach. They do however require the develop-ment of new capabilities – for example whilst non-profits may be very experienced at managing creative risk and financial uncertainty they are unlikely to be experienced in managing commercial risk.

The Challenge of Deferred Value Creation and Becoming Less Dependent on Government Grant Funding

If these are where the opportunities lie in terms of income diversifica-tion the next question is how can we fund their development? A con-sideration of the expenditure of the members of Common Practice reveals spending to be concentrated in programme and staffing costs, which are closely linked to direct organizational outcomes. What this analysis reveals is the lack of scope for development that exists within small organizations. This reinforces the poverty trap in which many arts workers are caught, allowing scant possibilities for promotions and pension security. The remarkably low overheads on which these organizations are run also militate against their development in the key areas of training, marketing, research and development and the accu-mulation of reserves. This marks another key area for future invest-ment. All of this indicates that the funds required to invest in activities that would generate new types of earned income are very unlikely to come from spare cash within the arts organizations themselves. Other

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investment sources will need to be found. Since the publication of the Size Matters and Capitalising Creativity papers Arts Council England and other funders have provided some pump-priming funding to help arts organizations develop these new activities.

The Need for More Appropriate Metrics

In considering the value generated by small organizations beyond the fiscal realm, we see that artistic, social and societal value are often realized long after a commission has left the initiating organization. By taking examples of the types of commissions made by members of the Common Practice group and following their trajectory through the art world, we see that value accrues over the lifetime of an object or idea, which is often capitalised upon by larger institutions and the commer-cial sector. This creation of ‘deferred value’ is therefore essential to the functioning of the arts ecosystem as a whole but further exacerbates the issue of having insufficient resources to invest in activities which would enhance the fiscal stability and sustainability of the organiza-tion in the here and now. However, the research undertaken in Size Matters exposes the inability of current metrics to measure this ‘deferred value’, which means that smaller organizations will appear less successful, since the majority of the value that they create is not visible via these metrics. In lacking such points of differentiation, we also lack the means to evalu-ate the relationship between the delivery approaches of small organiza-tions, the (often intangible) assets being created in the course of their work, and the artistic, social and societal contribution they make.

Summary

Arts organizations in the UK have learned some painful lessons about their levels of grant dependency and the challenges of sustainability in a recessionary climate. Given the current levels of grant dependen-cy amongst Swedish arts organizations and the likelihood of cuts in

government funding going forward how can the Swedish cultural sector learn from the UK experience? In the series of papers that have been published between 2007 and 2013 a number of theories and ideas have been put forward that suggest new ways of thinking about the assets and resources that arts organi- zations create and connects these to approaches to earned income development. One of the great services that smaller arts organizations provide to the arts ecosystem as a whole is that of the ‘deferred value’ they create. Whilst this deferred value creation is vital to the health of the sector it consumes resources and very rarely leads to income growth. In that sense it is a drain upon the already stretched resources. If we are to see small arts organizations flourish we need better metrics that accurately reflect the value that they deliver and we need to explore approaches to the utilization of assets that help to develop new and appropriate income streams. If these goals are indeed relevant to Swedish arts organizations then there is more detail available in terms of fiscal data on how UK arts organizations have responded to the cuts and the areas of their income development work that have born fruit.

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Since January 2013, Alexandra Baudelot, Dora Garcia and I have been running Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, an art space dedicated to research and residencies for artists. One of the main issues which we are concerned with is: “how to make a public become a community”. Since this adventure at the head of this institution is new to me, I will try to share with you my first impressions and the questions that have arisen, and will present our artistic vision, our first projects and our artists’ residencies. My description will probably sound like a mani-festo, a utopian one, full of hopes as to what an art institution could be. Since they opened in 2000, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers have always insisted on their attachment to their territory, their desire to be connected to the city and its inhabitants, their embedding in Aubervil-liers, which is a suburb of Paris and one of the three poorest cities in France. Though it is also one of the richest, in terms of the number of nationalities, languages and cultures. Aubervilliers counts around 74,000 inhabitants, 40% of whom are immigrants. Once a rural area, in the 19th century it was converted into a highly industrial location and there are still lots of traces of this industrial era. Les Laboratoires are themselves installed in a former ball-bearing factory. We want to stay connected to this social and economic context

Balancing on a Thin Line Mathilde Villeneuve

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without decreasing the quality of our propositions, and to keep a form of freedom we have achieved; independence of thought and action. This implies that our social involvement arises from, is impelled by, and solved through the artistic project we are supporting. We are convinced of a dual and mutual legitimacy, one side of which consists of the artists who come to stay and work in Aubervil-liers, while the other consists of the local people who visit this space for contemporary art. In her book, Participation, the political philosopher Joëlle Zask says: “taking part and contributing are two aspects of this form of participation that encourage the development of individuality and the formation of groups constituted by individualities. Private and pub-lic groups become freer in taking advantage of the plurality of their members and their individual fulfilments. They create “communities” in the sense that communication between their members, concerning public investigations, games or leisure activities, artistic creations, or the progress of such and such science, serves as mediator of their com-mon interests”.1 From the inside of a project you are sometimes part of such fluid sequencing, to so many forms of relationships built between mem-bers of a team, inhabitants, local actors, artists, that it’s hard to name them all.

History and Role

Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers were installed in a disused industrial building on the initiative of an artist, François Verret, in 2000, sup-ported by the communist mayor at that time Jack Ralite, a charismatic figure who did a lot for the city in terms of cultural structures. Since the very beginning, Les Laboratoires have been conceived as a space for research and experiments, residencies for artists, at a time when other places in France were hosting production and diffusion. Directed by a board composed only of artists, choreographers, critics and curators, Les Laboratoires have always asked for freedom to define their own rules.

It is important to state that their size never makes me feel dis-connected from the artistic practice. We are a team of slightly more than ten people, with a reasonable budget – a lot less than a theatre, a bit more than an art centre – but of course there is always a need to increase this budget to provide better conditions (especially salaries) for the artists, in order to allow them to stop their other activities and stay for longer periods at Les Laboratoires, so that they can concen-trate on what they do here.

Where I Go isn’t Necessarily Related to Where I Come From

We invite artists for a long-term residency early in their project. It’s only during their project, and not before, that they will decide the form of their research and a way of sharing it in public. The duration of this research process facilitates the creation of strong connections between the artistic projects, the region and people. It allows us to observe and to test ways of publication or public visibility that go beyond the pre-sentation of finished works. The choice of the form, of the medium, the place of publication, the participants and content of the project as well as what and whom it can be linked to, is made after considering the immediate and further surroundings: Les Laboratoires themselves, the city, the geographic, historical, cultural and social tissue they are part of. We are interested in this kind of connection because we are inter-ested in art that acts in “contact with reality”.

Alternatives Without Discipline

Since the beginning Les Laboratoires have been an alternative place. They did not ask to be officially labelled an “art centre», which would have assured a constant inflow of money from the state, but at the same time would have subjected us to a number of rules that we try not to be subject to. Today Les Laboratoires benefit from positive recognition by the state and are, in France, regarded as one of the most experimental places for art, dance and theatre. We do not consider art through “dis-

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ciplines”, we invite artists. Dancers do not have to dance; writers have no obligation to write. Others can or cannot do other things. Experi-mentation is important to us, as are improvisation and the possibility of failure. We focus on the projects, since it is these that define the modality of their appearance in the public sphere. Even the structure of Les Laboratoires is shaped around each project, according to its needs. Since we have limits such as the energy of the team, the budget, and similar matters, the shaping of the structure is an exchange and a negotiation with the artist. This also implies that we constantly ques-tion our structure, and our mode of operation. We consider an artist’s project as a place for exchanging knowledge and skills, a place of connection and meeting, of setting up a “situa-tion”, containing different data. Our job is to provide part of this data, the material, financial, and human resources that the artists need to set up a complex situation, and help them to position their work.

Collective Production

We consider the public as forming concentric circles. It can be involved in different stages of the project, and in different ways too. We try to adopt a horizontal mode of production, collective and plural, instead of a hierarchical one. Our main concerns are to make the artist meet people who could be implicated or might feel concerned by the proj-ect; to avoid linear approaches that result in confidential processes and thus in objects that are only visible to the public in a finished and per-fect state; to accompany the artist in thinking through the possibilities of sharing his research and making it public; to create the conditions of participation, and to make a public become an active community. We generate impulses for a project, and we collectively try to find methods and create conditions for setting up a situation open to exchange and discussion.

A Plurality of Individuality

We consider the public as an “under construction” community that shapes and reshapes itself through and around the different artistic projects. If we could consider two stages of public, we try to create the conditions for making the second one possible. There is a first pas-sive phase, seen as an ensemble of individuals who are inundated by the consequences of activities that are foreign to them. The public is passive in the sense that it ignores what is happening to it. It is driven out of its own habits by the impact of foreign activities. It is passive as well, since the individuals it is composed of are not linked to each other. In this case the public is not participative or contributive, and it consists of separate individuals. In a second phase the individuals forming this passive public carry out an “action” in favour of their in-terests. The isolated, excluded public (“circumscribed” as Dewey calls it, or “phantom” as Lippmann would say) finally organizes itself and exerts power. Members of a public can individually rebuild the coher-ence of their own existence by the same means. It is important to stress that we do think that the primary union – especially between artist and public – doesn’t pre-exist. The public doesn’t pre-exist the project that will build it. A community is built when its members share common notions and interests. We work with the artists to design and to open these zones of common interest. Community is based on mutual exchanges, and community should consider every one of its members. Taking part in a community is a way of maintaining stable social struc-tures without making them rigid. It’s only at first sight, that this seems paradoxical. Community is a place for anyone to share resources of individuation with others.

Possibility of Playing a Disruptive Role

At Les Laboratoires we experiment with exercises of democracy, but we try to avoid the pitfall of producing conformism (by consensus) and hope to create the opposite, a movement towards self-emancipation. And yes, I do believe that art can be a place to invent ways of being

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together, new relations of expressivity, affectivity, friendship; forms of common life. As an institution, we try to avoid becoming a “device of control”, as defined by Gilles Deleuze, a device that would, especially, control the latitude of individuals and that gives those who answer in line with the dominant ideological and social expectations more free-dom and consideration. But we don’t want to become a “public ser-vice”, because this implies being at the service of the people, though through the gaze of the policy dictated by the government. Creating communities through and around projects means creating marginal communities, not elites, who will show the right path, though a deviant one. Something that appears and disappears, and maybe doesn’t have a name. Namelessness might challenge dominant ideology better. Participation is a tough stake, complex to achieve, because it not only depends on strictly individual qualities but on the form of integra-tion between individual and society as well. It is important to increase the opportunities of co-building “situations” for a great number of people who are normally deprived of this option for economic, psycho-logical, social, historical, and cultural reasons. The concept of democracy that I share is based on the belief that ev-eryone, whatever their characteristics and qualities, is able to contribute something to the “common” that he is part of. You can call this belief a fact or you can call it a universal right. Participation is not easy because it demands the courage to “be oneself ”, to develop one’s own attention and curiosity, to recognize original ideas, to be porous to the world, and to develop an extroverted gaze. Joëlle Zask says: “taking into account the thought of others is not only a way to check my own thought but it’s also the condition of an anchor of beliefs in reality”. Indeed, art is as much a place of exacerbation of our beliefs as an experimental field for sharing and questioning the validity of these beliefs. This constantly redefines the “common”. “Recognizing the contribution of a person is not recognizing an achieved identity”, Zask explains, “it implies recog-nizing that his identity is not fixed, and acknowledging what this iden-tity is and how it arises when it interacts with my own trajectory; con-sequently I accept adapting my position in the world so that others, at least the ones I know, also have a place. Recognizing somebody means making room for him in a place we are ready to share.”2

Projects as Platforms of Exchange

We test different ways and methodologies for making this vision hap-pen. We set up platforms, meetings and exchanges, such as “Le Print-emps des laboratoires”, an annual public meeting, comprising a week-end of performances, workshops, discussions, in which issues chosen by the artists working at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers serve as proposals for games and debate, for theory and practice. We address contemporary social and political issues that interest us. The first year’s Printemps/Spring was called “Commune, Commons, Community”. It was staged in a scenographic device inspired by Dora Garcia’s prac-tice, and intended as a platform for welcoming artists, activists, theo-rists and public. A piano player accompanied talks and the singing of popular hymns. Latifa Laâbissi and Adva Zakai, two choreographers, proposed practical exercises, and we ate and talked, all together, for two days. It was important to mix people from the immediate surroundings with those from the less local art scene, to try to break down the bar-riers between audience and artists, and to roll out an unusual collec-tion of events prioritising the experience of art and politics over their representation, the circulation and confrontation of ideas over author-itarian forms of transmission. To prepare this event, we set up a read-ing group analysing texts dealing with the notions we were concerned with. The group met every two weeks and was open to all. Certain mem-bers of the reading group became “life books” that performed during the whole event, proposing an individual discussion of texts they had chosen. This “reading group” is part of a broader device that we named “Labo des labos” [Lab of the labs]. It’s conceived as an alternative learning space. The ”Labo des labos” is a frame for discussions and exchanges of practices and knowledge, creating a new view of the re-lationship between an audience and an art space, and allowing people to share the issues that underlie the artists-in-residence projects. It pro-vides a space for the free transmission of knowledge, with no diplomas and no principles other than those that the group creates. It encour-ages participation in the development of a collective thinking, based

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on heterogeneous fields and viewpoints. This platform serves to build an associated public: a public concerned by questions the artists ask in their projects. It is also a place where amateurs and specialists meet. We are extremely interested in how art can also be a place of experi-mental education. Another project, “La Semeuse” [The sower, a platform for urban biodiversity], that was set up in 2010 by the Slovenian artist and archi-tect Marjetica Potrc whose aim was to link plant biodiversity to cul-tural diversity in Aubervilliers. After she left, the project continued and is still running under our responsibility, with a coordinator dedicated to the project. Its problem areas are manifold. It questions the place we reserve for living things in our society as well as the methods and conditions we use to create or live together. It considers ties between humans and their environment. And it links acts such as gardening to social values and theoretical and artistic reflections about the future of living things in cities and the collective actions that these reflections engender. It serves as a training ground for appropriation of land and the city. It takes various shapes. It is a garden inaugurated in April 2012, used for gardening workshops for adults and children. Artists, design-ers, architects, ecologists, activists, town planners, students and inhab-itants come there to debate, and present their own experimental proj-ects. It grows, and has grown beyond our territory. The final example of a project I would like to share with you is the collaboration of Adva Zakai and Maki Suzuki who aim to create per-formance with the inhabitants of Aubervilliers, a kind of sitcom with-out a plot or a television set: a sitcom that takes place in life at home. Adva Zakai wants to draw a portrait of a neighbourhood, depicted in public events inside people’s houses, amplifying reality and fictional-izing the relations between people. It is also a means to confront im-mobilisation; a tool used to make the population of the city move from one area to another in order to attend the next episode of the series of happening at somebody else’s house. For a few months books, posters and other printed matter – published alternatively in French, Chinese, Arabic and other languages spoken in the city – will be announcing and starting to spread rumours of events soon to take place, thus creating a desire for people to learn more about an event or to become part of it.

The stories and performances will be based on true anecdotes collected from the inhabitants. In conclusion I would stress again that communities, where they occur, are not fixed. We try to accompany this movement of reshaping by inviting the public to shift from one project to another. It is impor-tant to facilitate a continuum of experiences in which relation to the outside world is personalized. A proposition doesn’t gain any visibility through the number of people who share it. It is a sowing process, not always looking for a larger public but for a better relation with them, the fairest ways of involving them. We try to be a place in perpetual motion that takes shape around the artistic projects that we support. We need to distinguish things, forms, words, to always specify and explain the singularity of each project, or each situation. This move-ment of singularization is important in resisting the urge to oversimpli-fy or quantify. We consider Les Laboratoires as an “environment”, an accelerator of opportunities and a space for creating the conditions of welcoming something that may, perhaps, not even have a name as yet.

1 Joëlle Zask, Participation – Essai dur les formes démocratiques de la participation, Le bord de l’eau, Paris, 2011, p. 2212 ibid., p. 288

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Some Locations and Locomotions for Contemporary ArtMick Wilson

We were approached by a nice man, an architect…

The nice man asked what space we wanted for our art school.

He said – imagine an art school in the city’s new transport hub!

We said – is this about an atrium again?

He said – no, no! it’s about thinking outside the box.

We said – outside the box? That sounds like we are losing space?

He said – art must ‘push the envelope’.

We said – there is a lot of white boxes in what we do.

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He said – don’t think about walls and rooms, think about ideas.

We said – we did all that thinking about ideas in the 1960s.

He said – not those ideas, think real ideas.

He said – it’s the twenty- first century… just imagine!

We said – will there be any rent to pay?

He said – anything is possible.

We said – ok… a transport hub you say… well then…

we want an art school on a train.

He said – is that even possible? We said – sure it is, we did it a century ago.

He said – will an art school fit on a train?

We said – it’s been done already, look, Camberwell College 1929.

He said – wow, that’s so cool! It’s creative.

We said – no, it’s not cool?!it’s hot damn groovy! He said – art on a train, now that’s urban living.

We said – our train is not a publicity stunt or urban branding,

Our train is not just a metaphor or a transport.

We are projecting future art practices.

He said – a train? That’s a very narrow path into the future.

Are you going back to the future through the age of steam?

I wanted to say – it’s ok, our train is an ironic horse

But my colleagues wouldn’t let me make anymore bad puns.

So we said – but buildings are a really old idea.

Trains are a new thing really, not even two centuries old…

Ah go on! Please, give us a train, mister! – we said. He said – well, maybe…

…it could be a landmark attraction for the city. We said – better than a Liseberg roller coaster! < interrupts to show the Simpsons >

Then, because we thought we might really get our train…

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we organised a debate with teachers and students.

We asked them – can you have an academy on a train?

Some of them got upset.

They wanted to know where their studios would be.

We said – can we just imagine this and see where it might lead?

Some said – we are not so interested in your imaginations.

We are interested in our imaginations.

And we would like some empty white boxes to imagine with.

And then some people started calling each other “neo- liberals”.

And so the story rolls on.

We are waiting for our train.

But not in a utopia station.

We place our hopes in politics and culture and art and…

the local motives.

Hayley Newman, London Tube, 1990s – making art on a train. Adrian Piper, Catalysis series, New York, 1970s. an example of making art on a bus (and on the subway also).

End of Part 1

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How free are art institutions in our seemingly free society? Institu-tional freedom is of course relative, internally as well externally – or as Jonas Ekeberg puts it in his opening presentation of the Samtids-konstdagar conference: “There are no free lunches!” The situation today is far more precarious than it was around the turn of the millen-nium, at least in respect of being able to challenge given institutional frameworks. Stakes are higher, security is lower – the institutions are no longer refuges for critical practices, but are under constant threat from the all too manifest ghost of New Public Management philoso-phy, in the form of neo-liberal cultural policies. Thus reads at least one of the more dominant of the current descriptions of the institutional predicament; a description that unquestionably imbued the voices and sentiments during the conference. So how are we to deal with this predicament? Would it perhaps, in order to secure and protect existing platforms and frameworks, be the right move to adopt a kind of strategic essentialism, defending the old buildings and the established structures for distribution and financing? From a Nordic perspective, the golden heydays of institutional critique have, according to Ekeberg, evolved into a much more precarious situ-ation, where a necessary and strategic self-censorship may have taken the place of internal critique and deconstructive practices. And in this,

ReflectionNils Olsson

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one distinguishing trait is a kind of “backwards provincialism”, where the “point of reference is always elsewhere”, and where the prevailing openness towards international phenomena amounts to a reluctance towards what is local and regional. The imperative challenge that Nordic art institutions are facing today seems, then, to be how to develop an institutional framework that harbours a self-critical understanding of the nature and limits of the institution (as a building, workspace, platform, distributor, archive, agent), but doesn’t run the risk of jeopardizing its own freedom or relative autonomy in the face of the circumscribing nature of current cultural policies? Ekeberg’s suggestion for how to proceed is to reformulate the relationship between art institutions and the public sphere. And by in-troducing the notion of the public sphere, he establishes an important part in the cluster of key concepts that defined the Samtidskonstdagar conference – a cluster where the “public sphere” is joined by the ubiq-uitous “community” as well as “territory”. In short, New Institution-alism did away with the object, but, and more importantly, also the traditional institutional framework that provided a stable interface between audience and art. To challenge both framework and interface was of course necessary from the self-critical perspective of art insti-tutions of the 90’s, but it also made them vulnerable to what followed: namely that the humanist public sphere was ultimately “replaced by a bureaucratic and repressive administrative structure which has subor-dinated institutions as well as agents”. The important task for institu-tions thus becomes to acknowledge their legacy, referring back to the good old days when audience, art, institutions, and state policies had a proven relationship that allowed, and perhaps even asked for, critical attitudes. Today, links between the past and the future of institutions must be created – i.e. a restoration of the art institution’s relation to the public sphere. As persuasive as Ekeberg’s perspective and suggestions might be, the crucial question remaining is what “public sphere” actually means in this particular situation? Is this an overly strategic concept? Is the apparent sentimentality indisputably benign? And where does the his-torical narrative trajectory leading to and beyond New Institutional-

ism end with regards to the notion of a new kind of “public sphere”? Habermas’ notion is in itself a rather stiff, monolithic and sentimental concept at its core. Does the narrative Ekeberg presents express a simi-lar sentimental notion of the tradition and history of institutions – as in his featured case of Pontus Hultén? Or is this sentimental stance a necessary strategic one – the point being that the traditional institu-tions today are under attack, and in urgent need of reaffirmation? In her presentation, Marijke Steedman from London’s Whitechapel Gallery, actually offers an example that does just what Ekeberg seems to be looking for. Several of the Whitechapel Gallery projects present-ed by Steedman show how an institution can acknowledge its past and future while providing a dynamic platform for community-based prac-tice. The difference though is that the key concept in the case of the Whitechapel projects is community, not public sphere. The difference thus being about levels of participation – the focus is on community and demography, not on re-educating a general “public” in advanced art appreciation. Whitechapel’s community programme offers a plat-form that allows the institution to shift to accommodate the artist they are working with. This demands a new understandings of audiences as well as of the public sphere; the latter concept here obviously giving way to “community” in the process of mapping out the diminishing public sphere. Here Steedman’s and Sarah Thelwall’s perspectives converge to an extent in the task of developing alternative strategies for navigating the current socio-political, economical and administrative landscape – although from radically different perspectives. Thelwalls’s report Size Matters is in part an eye-opening account of how smaller cultural in-stitutions can cash in on their creative output without having to see it ultimately being usurped by larger institutions with the means and leverage to distribute the original idea to a larger public, commodify-ing the creative output in the process. In short, the mission is to “turn assets into income”, from the perspective of small institutions. Through the notion of “deferred value creation”, Sarah Thelwall addresses the problem that the value gained from creative production tends not to come back to the original investors or commissioners. It is basically a discussion about how to develop what is small scale and short term

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into big(ger) scale and long(er) term. And in times when funding seems to be more precarious than ever, sustainable models for continuous financing of independent cultural practice are more than welcome. Nevertheless, one should perhaps ask if we primarily need alterna-tive ways to navigate within the system? Or do we need more “directors choosing to be sacked”, to reference Ekeberg? From the perspective of my natural habitat, academia, I would say that the biggest threat, in particular to the humanities, is not represented by the decrees stem-ming from New Public Management strategies or a neoliberal capital-ist understanding of what an academy should be. The biggest threat is the spontaneous conformism to these decrees, so willingly implement-ed within the institutions. It is safe to say that the threat of a conform-ist attitude applies to both independent actors and smaller institutions – especially with regard to the demands that are currently put on con-temporary culture when applying for different types of state funding. And from a creative perspective, or perhaps even aesthetic: why is it important (which Thelwall seems to presuppose) for the local/innova-tive creators of deferred value to see turnover from its realizations in the form of specific generating subjects and organizations? Meaning: to what extent does the condition for creating deferred value depend on the momentary, short-term projects and organizations? What if short time spans are necessary for certain forms of creative outcome? (I would argue that this is crucial.) And if this is to a large extent the case, how should the “trickle down effect” hopefully created by the realization of the deferred value, be distributed, and to whom? Know-ing how to be taken seriously by the treasury might prove to be impor-tant. But when is it important, and when does it run the risk of end-ing up in non-critical conformism? Does it have to be a specific small institution that recoups deferred value realization, or could it rather be a scene, a framework – trickle down on a structural level? The presup-posed logic here is that small wants or needs to be big – which from an art historical perspective is debatable to say the least. Is turnover the only possible way of sustaining creative production? Sure, at least from the perspective of the enterprise – but why business models, and not a structural perspective? Why incite individual cases and not a segment of society? Why an individual perspective and not a collective one?

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Jonas Ekeberg is a curator and critic based in Oslo. He was editor-in-chief of the Nordic online journal Kunstkritikk from 2009 to 2013. He was the chief curator of Momentum – Nordic Biennial for Contempo-rary Art in 2000, founding director of Oslo Kunsthall the same year and a curator at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway from 2002 – 2004. From 2004 to 2009 Ekeberg served as the director of Preus Museum, Norway’s national museum for photography. Ekeberg is cur-rently working on a major book and exhibition themed The Rise and Fall of a Nordic Art Scene 1990–2010.

Nils Olsson is a teacher and collaboration manager at the Depart-ment of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion at the University of Gothenburg. He also teaches at the Valand Academy of Arts, Universi-ty of Gothenburg. In the spring of 2013 he published his book Konsten att sätta texter i verket (förlag Glänta produktion), which deals with the relationship between literature and other art forms within modern-ism and neo-avantgarde.

Marijke Steedman holds a position as curator for Community Pro-grammes at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. She is also the editor of the publication Gallery as community: art, education, politics. This title discusses a particular vein of curatorial activity initiated by gal-leries, much contested, and articulated differently across institutions. It is characterised by activity beyond the site of the gallery, an inter-est in context and situation and a tendency to problematise notions of community.

Sarah Thelwall, strategist and consultant. After a first career in bio-tech and pharma Sarah wrote her MBA thesis on the structure of the London contemporary art market. She has gone on to advise on mech-anisms for bringing investment finance in to the creative industries, on approaches to developing new income streams in the non-profit arts and culture sector at both a governmental and an individual organisa-tion level. She has worked across the world but now focuses on Europe and the Middle East.

Mathilde Villeneuve, born 1981, graduated in Modern Literature at the Sorbonne, Paris as well as in Humanities and Cultural Studies at the London Consortium. She lives and works in Paris. From 2006 to 2012 she coordinated the external projects of the Art School of Cergy (ENSAPC) and ran its exhibition space La Vitrine in Paris. Since 2013 she co-directs the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. As an independent cu-rator and art critic, she has organised exhibitions and residencies in Paris, Toulouse, Marseille, Lot, and writes for magazines (Zéro Deux, Roven, Hypertexte, 20/27) and artists’ catalogues. She is particularly interested in documentary approaches, the relation of artistic pro- duction to its environment and in the mechanics of writing history. In collaboration with Virginie Bobin she prepares the next issue of Archive Journal (Archive Books ed.), centered on artistic practices us-ing republication to make forgotten or withheld information available.

Mick Wilson (BA, MA, MSc, PhD) is an educator, artist, writer, and researcher, currently Head of the Valand Academy of Arts, Univer-sity of Gothenburg, Sweden (2012–); chair of SHARE Network on doctoral education in the arts (2010– 2013), and member of European Artistic Research Network (2005–) formerly Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, Ireland (2008–2012). Educated in art practice, art history, information technology and pedagogy, he completed his doctoral thesis on the subject of Conflicted Faculties: Rhetoric, Knowledge Conflict and the University, (NCAD/NUI, 2006).

Biographies

The seminar was organized by Riksutställningar/Swedish Exhibition Agency in cooperation with GIBCA Göteborgs International Biennal for Contemporary Art, Göteborgs Konsthall, Kultur i Väst, Akademin Valand, with the support of Västra Götalandsregionen.

Editorial:Mia Christersdotter Norman – Head of Operations, Röda Sten KonsthallStina Edblom – Artistic Director, GIBCA Göteborgs Internationella KonstbiennalPetra Johansson – Art Consultant, Kultur i Väst, Västra GötalandsregionenAnna Lamberg – Exhibition Assistant, Göteborgs KonsthallMikael Nanfeldt – Art Hall Director, Göteborgs KonsthallPanthea Pournoroozy – Project Assistant, Riksutställningar/Swedish Exhibition AgencyJohan Pousette – Contemporary Art Manager, Riksutställningar/Swedish Exhibition Agency

Graphic design: Sandra PraunEnglish text editing: William JewsonISBN 978-91-981164-4-1 Riksutställningar (Swedish Exhibition Agency) 2014Copyright: Creative commons

http://www.riksutstallningar.se/sites/default/files/documents/program-A3_ENG_print.pdf