Friedman_Yona – what's next?

Experiments in Integrated Programming

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:17:15 +0000

Many contemporary artists operate beyond the studio and traditional exhibition spaces, providing both a need and an opportunity for galleries and museums to develop new models for the production and presentation of such work. Drawing on recent practice at the Serpentine Gallery, London, this paper explores some of these issues, and argues for an integrated approach to programming.
When artists make art that involves people either as collaborators, facilitators or active subjects, they pose complex questions, not least of which is the issue of authorship. For art institutions, such ways of working often require a rethinking of the status of the art work itself, as what is produced is often contingent and does not always lend itself easily to traditional exhibition formats. Developing new models for the production and presentation of such work, however, is an opportunity for galleries and museums to embrace the ways in which contemporary artists are increasingly operating beyond the studio and gallery, and in doing so extend their reach and influence.
Traditionally, the work of museums and galleries is departmentalised into institutional functions, creating divisions of labour and expertise. Education, Learning and Public Programmes are often seen as secondary to, and servicing Exhibitions, and this hierarchy has created disparities in the way that curators work together and also with artists across programme strands. Drawing on three recent projects – the Park Nights series, Dis-assembly and Hearing Voices, Seeing Things – this paper examines the concept of integrated programming and the strategy for working with artists in a range of contexts to produce new work as developed by the Serpentine Gallery in London.
Recent curatorial discussions have focused on “new institutionalism”. A term borrowed from the social sciences, it proposes a transformation of the art institution from within. Characterised by open-endedness and dialogue, and leading to events-based and process-based work, it utilises some of the strategies inherent in the ways in which many contemporary artists make work. Since the 1990s many artists and curators have embraced the idea of creating flexible platforms for presenting work, extending the institution and its functions and absorbing aspects of institutional critique as proposed in the 1970s. The “new institution” places equal emphasis on all programmes and creates spaces and modes of display that reflect this, including archives, reading rooms, residency schemes, talks and events as well as exhibitions. Writer and curator Alex Farquharson has noted: “‘New Institutionalism’, and much recent art, side steps the problem of the white cube altogether. If white-walled rooms are the site for exhibitions one week, a recording studio or political workshop the next, then it is no longer the container that defines the contents as art, but the contents that determine the identity of the container.”¹The implications for the gallery as a platform for experimentation and a laboratory for learning have been embraced by curators and artists alike, and education and learning are at the heart of this process of reinvention. What new institutionalism demands is an integrated approach to programming and the integration of programming teams so that education, exhibitions, performance, public programmes are conceived as part of a programme of activity rather than the more traditional and territorial departmentalisation of these areas of work. This interdisciplinary approach engages a wide framework of timescales and the flexibility to work across strands of programming.
Whilst there has been a number of recent examples of curators and artists adopting the pedagogical frameworks of public programming and education, the impact and potential of these projects – specifically in relation to the function of education and learning within the institution – are only beginning to be realised. These seemingly “pedagogic” projects raise complicated questions for curators, critics and educationalists. Questions of how this work should be evaluated and what it means when the mechanisms of programming are applied to the production of new institutional spaces are critical, and are questions that need to be addressed by those of us that work in the cracks across the gaps, in and beyond the confines of the institution.
Lectures and conferences presented as projects by artists or curators focus on the production of knowledge and foreground criticality and discourse. For example, in Beautiful City for the 2007 Munster Sculpture Project, Maria Pask programmed a series of talks about belief and faith by a wide range of speakers, including religious and spiritual figures as well as teachers and gurus. The talks took place in a temporary canvas city and the ambience was reminiscent of a festival or village fête. Similarly, Thomas Hirschhorn’s 24hr Foucault – a multi-platform event that took place over twenty-four hours at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2004 – saw those who attended acting as both audience and witnesses to the event. The Serpentine Gallery’s Park Nights series, initiated in 2002 and now also including the Marathon events introduced by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2005, provides a discursive space that explores the intensive temporality associated with events rather than exhibitions. Specialist audiences come together for the events, creating a momentary critical mass that amplifies the intensity as well as the reach of the Serpentine’s programme. The positioning of these strands of the programme is critical: when part of an integrated programme of activity, the emphasis can oscillate between events, talks, screenings and exhibitions as appropriate, allowing the institution to reinvent itself through these different strands and across audiences.
Anton Vidokle’s Night School at the Museum held at the New Museum, New York, in 2007–8, was presented as a curatorial project: although it mirrored the work and function of education and learning departments within galleries, it was given the same status as an exhibition. On the museum’s website, for example, it was marketed as a major strand of curatorial activity: “Night School is an artists’ project by Anton Vidokle in the form of a temporary School. A year-long programme of monthly seminars and workshops, Night School draws upon a group of local and international artists, writers and theorists to conceptualise and conduct the programme.”²This was true also of the unrealised Manifesta 6 (the itinerant European biennial exhibition) which proposed again a temporary art school as the framework for an exhibition. The curators wrote: “In its customary introversion, the arts community does not let well enough alone, but often extends itself just enough to instrumentalise the world around it as props for its own production. A prime example of this tokenism is the growing range of art projects based on a form of seemingly benevolent social science research. The research results (or works of art) are, more often than not, neither up to scratch academically nor do they imbue the information with any new artistic significance. They are forms of either pop information, inaccessible specialist data or, sadly, sensationalism. In contrast, a genuine form of awareness and constructive involvement necessitates commitment, erudition, confrontation and a recoiling from the superficiality of political correctness.’”³Curatorial claims for these projects suggest a desire to distance itself from the work of education and learning departments whilst still wanting to create an environment, even an “aesthetic”, of academic engagement, but the overall aim is often to produce a spectacular event rather than an educational experience. The experience for the participant is inherently different in each context: while a participant in an educational programme could expect to be involved in a pedagogical experience, the participant in, or audience of, curatorial projects witness them, not as a site of learning but rather as a spectacle. How might curators and educationalists develop curatorial strategies of convergence and collaboration? As these curatorial events create a specific mode of learning and knowledge production, their visibility within institutions is beginning to map out a new set of possibilities for a collapse of terrain and recognition of expertise. The combination of curatorial expertise in terms of staging performance or spectacle and the expertise of educationalists in terms of knowledge production and pedagogical process might lead to genuinely new functions for the institution.⁴Projects that extend beyond the gallery have long been the terrain both of artists and of galleries. They are an opportunity to approach production in a way that can achieve a genuinely engaged but complex re-negotiation of the operation of the gallery or museum. By undertaking local projects it is possible to think about a renegotiation of the role of the gallery and museum as a site of production that operates beyond the demands of the market and in relation to wider socio-political concerns. The question of how and where the resulting work then resides, and the challenge of reading a work that simultaneously embraces and negates the notion of authorship, is crucial. These situations and interventions result in a collapse between politics and aesthetics and produce work both in the world and as social intervention.
Dis-assembly was a project that culminated in 2006 with exhibitions at North Westminster Community School (NWCS) and the Serpentine Gallery. Artists Faisal Abdu’Allah, Christian Boltanski, Runa Islam and architect Yona Friedman were commissioned to make new artwork out of a period of research at the school. Established in the 1960s as a flagship comprehensive that aimed to offer a progressive integrated curriculum in a creative and dynamic learning environment, the school was facing closure. For both the students and artists involved, the reality of the school’s imminent replacement by two new city academies gave the project a special urgency.
The classroom can be seen as a mirror of society, with nearly every aspect of the adult world replicated and amplified in the closed and confined space of the school, a space that is both physical and temporal. This site is an extraordinary place for artists to have the opportunity to make art, and for the students and staff the transformative potential of art becomes a reality.
Dis-assembly celebrated the history and achievements of the school with a series of ambitious residencies. Artists were invited to visit the school and propose a way in which they could work with and alongside the students and staff to produce artwork. Like many inner-city schools, NWCS had students from diverse national backgrounds (there were seventy-three different first languages). The head teacher Janet Morrison described the school as ‘benefiting from a high percentage of refugee students, leading to an incredibly politicised and socially aware culture within the school”. Each artist had a different kind of engagement with the school. Some worked as facilitators, focusing on the students and their creativity, or acted as collaborators, producing work that could not have been made without the students’ participation. Others made work using the school’s situation as core material. Each invested the enormous amount of time that is essential when developing models of working that can resist being formulaic and prescriptive.
Faisal Abdu’Allah worked closely with the students as a collaborator and facilitator. As an artist in residence in 2005–6, he attended school for two days a week, establishing a close working relationship with the staff and students. The photographic work that he produced is a testament to the time he invested in building relationships with the students. His project empowered the students to articulate their situation in relation to the school’s closure and wider political issues. Thinking and talking about making images inevitably raised issues of identity and politics, and these discussions were as important to the project as the resulting images.
In 1992 Christian Boltanski had posed as the school’s photographer, photographing the entire intake of students that year and exhibiting the resulting 144 photographs in the school and, across the road, in the Lisson Gallery. The photographs were sold to students at cost price whereas through the Lisson they were sold as artworks. For Boltanski the work will only be completed by a second phase, which he has begun for Dis-assembly in collaboration with Abdu’Allah. Each of the original 144 students is being traced and rephotographed. Although incomplete at the time, the new series was shown opposite the original series in the Serpentine Gallery exhibition. When completed, the project will stand as a memorial to the school community over the years.
By contrast, Runa Islam used interviews with students to make a 16 mm film (fig. 1⁵). Working with writers Georgia Fitch and Laurence Coriat to develop a script in a series of workshops, she spent two weeks on site shooting a film with the students as the actors. The film drew upon the specificities of NWCS and through its assembling and layering of the students’ experiences of growing up within an inner city school evoked aspects of the contemporary cultural life.
Together, the three strands of Dis-assembly allowed artists, students and staff to articulate their experiences and realities through a series of artworks. For -everyone, the project offered a way of testing the possibility of producing art in and through a period of programmed engagement with the world. And the relationships established here formed the basis of a second long-term project called Edgware Road, which involves a series of artists’ residencies at a new research centre in the Edgware Road, London, due to end in 2010.
Hearing Voices, Seeing Things was a series of artists’ residencies that resulted in an exhibition and event at the Serpentine Gallery in 2006. The project began as a series of conversations, firstly with Jacqueline Ede, Lead Occupational Therapist for Arts and Rehab, North-East London Mental Health Trust (NELMHT). Her desire for an engagement with the Gallery was matched by that of the Serpentine to create opportunities for artists to challenge conventional ideas about the places where art can be seen and by whom. Following a year of visits to the Gallery which established the basis for a more sustained residency, it became clear that a project could happen and that there was a commitment and desire on the part of NELMHT to make a residency possible.
Artists Bob and Roberta Smith and Jessica Voorsanger were invited by the Serpentine to be artists-in-residence at NELMHT. Together they founded The Leytonstone Centre of Contemporary Art (LCCA), which, in fact, was a garden shed. Bob and Jessica decided to invite more artists to participate and the LCCA Outreach Group (LOG) was formed.
Meetings and conversations were at the heart of the project and work was produced through these exchanges. The immediacy and intimacy, as well as conviviality of these sites of production, informed the resulting work which asked secondary audiences (those who were not directly involved) to question and challenge their preconceptions about mental health and the stigmas associated with it. The normality and everyday nature of mental well-being resonated through the work, while the humility and humour that pervaded the project allowed experiences to be articulated with clarity. This is where the artists played a crucial role – not as therapists but as artists equipped with a vocabulary and language that could articulate the most fragile of realities.⁶For some individuals the barriers to communication were difficult to negotiate. Memory dictates the way we define ourselves and how we negotiate the world. Working with people experiencing memory loss in the Petersfield Dementia Centre in Hampshire, Bob and Roberta Smith created signposts reminding us of who we are, where we are and what we need to remember to do in Reminder. Those that the artists Victor Mount worked with – the Hearing Voices group – experience a polyphony of voices. For the artist, the challenge here was that of translating and making work from the experience of not hearing voices yet being part of this group.
Two of the groups involved young people. Brookside School is an adolescent unit which provides a safe and therapeutic environment for young people. Karen Densham worked as artist-in-residence there, inviting the young people to create and then destroy ceramics. This legitimisation of a violent and destructive act was important for this particular group because they are so rarely trusted to destroy something. Young carers worked with artist Andy Lawson in their free time to create work that looked at their world outside of their everyday responsibilities. The images they created revealed beauty in the tiny details of their everyday environment.
The therapeutic role of art is an unavoidable and challenging subject for artists working in a Mental Health Trust. When art meets mental health everything is possible and impossible at once. The rupture of everyday normality and the juxtaposition of two environments led to volatile and exciting possibilities. The question of who or what is “normal” and what mental health might mean became key concerns. The artists were tasked with being artists rather than therapists, and the therapists provided clinical and therapeutic support. On a fundamental level, the project involved a meeting of people and was seen as a opportunity for everyone involved. The artists, the health professionals and individual participants discovered what can be achieved by working together. The legacy of the project is an ongoing arts programme that is now established as part of the work of the Trust.
Whilst it is relatively easy to commission artists and to create projects where extraordinary learning can be produced, it is perhaps harder to find the time and institutional space to look critically at what is produced and discuss the value of the work. This is necessarily a slow process within institutions where typically there is little time and space for reflection. In my view the solution lies somewhere between the academy and the gallery, and we should continue to develop strategies to ensure that we can oscillate and operate with stealth across both and smuggle knowledge between the two.

Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was presented in “Situating -Gallery Education” at the annual conference of the -Association of Art Historians, held at Tate, London, in April 2008.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: Tate Papers, 11, Spring 2009.

1.) Alex Farquharson, “Bureaux de change”, Frieze, 101, September 2006.
2.) Text from the New Museum website, www.newmuseum.org [February 2008].
3.) Mai Abu ElDahab, “On How to Fall With Grace – or Fall Flat on Your Face”, in: Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle, Florian Waldvogel (eds.), Notes for an Art School. International Foundation Manifesta 2006.
4.) At the same time, the new convergence of the academy and the gallery may be helpful here. See, for example, Academy and Summit, initiatives of the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, London, in collaboration with Kunstverein Hamburg and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and, for Summit, the Witte de With in Rotterdam. The Städelschule in Frankfurt and its relationship to Portikus is also an interesting solution.
5.) As can be found on the blog via the QR code at the end of this text: Runa Islam, Conditional Probability 2006. Four part 16 mm film installation. Variable duration: Part 1: 20 min 25 sec, Part 2: 22 min 40 sec, Year Portrait: 6 min 43 sec, Screen Tests: 30 min 32 sec. Photograph: Declan O’Neill Courtesy White Cube, © Runa Islam.
6.) Ironically, in an early conversation Bob told us that the “real” Roberta Smith was an art therapist.

A New Context

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:39 +0000

Such an architecture permits a quasi-infinite variety of combinations: a new aesthetics

Yona Friedman, still from A New Aesthetics, 2008

I think in order to talk about architecture we have to start with a very simple fact: architecture is simply an epiphenomenon of something more general, a deep context, so before getting to some conclusion on architecture, I will try to describe this context.
The first thing is that the territoriality of states is slowly disappearing. You know, a state is defined judicially by a territory; it is an organisation between clearly set borders. For example, for a state to belong to the United Nations, it has to have a clearly set territory. But this territorial state is losing its power more and more. The world is governed by something different, a different organisation, not clearly identified, which is not territorial. We have in history only one example of a non-territorial state – the Catholic Church. It had a very small territory and for a long time was a governing element for the known world at that time. Now we are governed, so newspapers tell us, by finance, commerce, trade agreement and so on. That is undeniable. But this organisation is not a clearly set body; you cannot tell who directs, who makes the policy, who is responsible. It is more an oligarchy, a rather small organisation, relative to the global size, which is implanted everywhere. It is an unclear situation, as we don’t seem to know by whom we are governed. Yes, we can determine that this or that financial organisation is governed by this or that person, but the whole, the network which makes things happen, is not clearly governed. So this is the first element. The second important element of what we are talking about is information. We are saying all the time that the world is governed by information. Sure, but we shouldn’t forget that information is not clearly said, because, for example, when media talk about information, they are thinking only about the emitter, but information becomes information only when it arrives to a receiver. But what does the receiver understand from the information he gets? What is his interpretation? It is a complete insecurity. This information world, the information network, produces insecurity. You know that there are lots of things and too much of which is emitted, and you don’t know who receives what information and how he or she will interpret it. So we have a complete incertitude and flux; we are living in a hazy world. This leads me to the next element – ecology.
We don’t have a global image about ecology. All political ecological movements concentrate themselves on this or that point, but there is no global centre. My point of view is that the real problem with ecology, let us call it an eco-policy, is a mental problem. All through for centuries, we have considered ourselves as conquerors: we had to conquer nature. I think that the right answer would be very, very different – to adapt ourselves to nature instead of conquering it. What does this mean? Conquering nature means that we impose our conditions on the environment; adapting to environment means that we accept the conditions of our environment, and we adapt our way of life for it.
I will take a very important element, heating. This is quite important for our consideration later for architecture, as architecture is conceived as a closed box in which you create a climate that you consider adapted to your survival. The biggest energy waste we have is to create this artificial climate within the closed box. There would be another attitude, which is followed by nearly all the other species: this is to follow the climate, to migrate. Today, taking United Nations statistics, about 80 % of the world population lives in areas where you don’t need heating. Rich people go to these places because they can afford it, and poor people stay in these areas because they cannot live if they go out of them. All the shanty towns of the world are in the hot countries; there are no shanty towns in Siberia – it’s impossible. So I think that if we have less climatic production, for example, simply umbrellas in hot zones, it can be possible. In temperate zones, it would be logical that for the winter time people migrate to another area climatically more favourable. This is possible in today’s world, because most of the work can be done at a distance. Work at a distance, work that doesn’t need direct physical interface, is more and more the fact. The reason for this is that the bulk of what humans produce today is immaterial. For example, finance is not material, thought is not material. This means that there is only a very small part of production that involves effective physical presence.
The same thing about social contact. Socially, surely people speak more through mobile phones than they speak directly. If I look at a street in Paris, older people too are giving their monologue to their mobile phone. That means their social life happens in large part without the physical presence of their social partner. This is noteworthy. In the old city schemes, there was a very important element, the forum, the physical meeting place. Today, the forum is not effective anymore. People have an immaterial, a virtual, forum. For example, the Champs-Élysées in the I9th century was a sort of a forum where people of certain classes met, and there were many others like this. I am saying the Champs-Élysées because it is the best-known. Today, the Champs-Élysées is not a forum anymore. The forum is somewhere in space through the mobile phone.
So these elements obviously change our outlook on the possibility of the development of the epiphenomenon that is architecture – the closed-in box is less necessary. Proximity, which was the basis of city-forming, is less and less necessary. You don’t need to be very near to your neighbour. The neighbourhood becomes a virtual thing. Technically, there is one other element which is important: proximity was imposed on, if you want, town planning or area planning, because of the networks, but now you don’t need the physical network anymore, you don’t need, really, the phone network, it is in your pocket. You don’t need to use the electricity network too much, since many of your instruments work on battery. It is very easy to imagine areas that you will charge once in a month and make them full, like you do today to your car, so, again, proximity is not necessary. You do not need to have, for example, a fuel dump next door to you – it can be 50 kilometres away.
So it is the loosening of this network which leads us to a new image of the city and a new image of architecture. What this image is, I cannot tell you. I can only show with a few models how I am trying to look at it. I am simply talking about this development since it will determine, really, what the coming architecture will be.
There is another element that is important, and that I am calling the routine. Routine is something we have nearly unchanged in the last c. 20,000 years. For example, social grouping is a routine. We will not get rid of it. It’s not a question of discussing whether this or that social grouping is better; we cannot get rid of our routine. The way of our behaviour, our daily behaviour, is a routine: we are eating and sleeping practically in the same way as our ancestors 5,000 years ago. I was speaking earlier about territoriality. There is another territoriality, which is the routine territoriality. This can be the family or the tribal territoriality. This is important; this will not disappear. So when I was speaking about the coming architecture with all the new elements, at the same time I have to think about the family territoriality or the group territoriality, which will stay. I don’t know what kind of city we will live in, I don’t know what kind of architecture there will be, but the family cohabitation is a fact and will not change. It will have another legal status that is secondary. The group, the small group, cohabitation, territoriality – I am calling it the urban village – also will not change. But what will be the agglomeration of urban villages wherein proximity is not necessary anymore? This is an open question. I am not pretending to give a solution for it.
In all my practical life in architecture, I was proposing possible solutions, but I know that there are only tentative solutions, and I think that the important thing is to understand that architecture in itself is not important. It’s only a manifestation of a deeper context. Architecture and shoes are about the same importance, but perhaps the shoe might be more important because if the shoe causes pain for your feet, you react immediately. If the architecture is not really comfortable, you put up with it for many years. So don’t overestimate architecture: architecture is not important … it is only the visible part of a context, which in itself is very important and which is out of our control.
Climate, governments, communication and technology are out of our control, so they are a part of the general environment, because environment is not only nature, but also the man-made environment. We can do nothing else but to adapt to it as well as we can. What I was trying to do with this talk was to give an incitement, to try to see the things broadly, and that’s all.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: Serpentine Gallery Manifesto Marathon, 2008.