Public funds: responsibility and work

The Centre d’Art Santa Mònica invited Chris Smith, former British Minister of Culture from 1997-2000, to give a talk on money, institutions and art. During the conversation over lunch beforehand he fired off the following question: Has any exhibition at the CASM caused controversy? Very patronize or I replied that this question was the result of his vision of contemporary art from a British perspective, and that the Barcelona public’s capacity to be scandalised was ridiculously small in comparison with a British audience. I went as far as to add that the meaning behind certain attitudes related to Anglo-saxon pop music was unthinkable in the Spanish scene. In fact, I accused British society of being structured according to a conservative mould and also of being naïve. Afterwards I told him that two things short-circuited any type of controversy over artistic expression here. The first was the general lack of attention that paid by the public to art, and the second was (and I’ve heard it so often I now believe it) the capacity of institutions to absorb any type of demonstration.

But some time later I heard a story that questions all the prejudices I have just described. At the “Trans Sexual Express” exhibition at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica the following incident occurred.

The ancient cloister in which the CASM is located is owned by the archbishopric of Barcelona, which leases it for a symbolic rent (€1) to the Catalan Government on two conditions: that it is used for public cultural purposes, and that the ecclesiastical authorities have the right to veto any exhibition they consider unsuitable. Well, this right of veto has been exercised only once, and that was in respect of the photo that was hung on the front of the building for the “Trans Sexual Express” exhibition by the British artist Tracey Emin, in which she was shown waving banknotes around her sex.

It’s curious.

Perhaps it’s not so much that local institutions are prepared to swallow anything as the fact that it is we art professionals who are gullible.

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you” *

So let me launch into some paranoid disquisitions.

The institution. The institution is managed by professionals selected by political appointees who have been put in place by holders of political offices who have been formed by their party, so it is the party that defines the institution. And this party is the one that obtained the majority in a democratic election. It is no bad thing that it is the representatives of the majority who shape the institution. The consequence of living in a society governed by a party-based system is that the management of the institution’s work depends on ideology. The chief concerns must be education, equal opportunities, etc.

It is obvious that this management is oriented towards the anonymous citizen. It is he or she who votes for a party, which has picked those persons formed in the party who are to occupy political positions and who, if they win the elections, will choose the political appointees who will finally decide on the professionals to be employed.

So the work undertaken by the institution is a means of fulfilling goals of a social rather than an artistic nature. Among those that occur to me are: increasing educational and leisure activities; promoting cultural tourism; attend to minorities; providing grants to artists and also, covertly, to the press; making use of the propaganda opportunities provided by art; carrying out activities that affect the urban landscape, etc.

In other words, the reasoning behind the institution’s investment in art, and it is a logical one, is that to the greatest possible effort it should be for the public good, this being understood in the widest sense of the word as the intention that it should cover the maximum number of persons, that it should have a vast capacity, and that everybody should feel they are included and are getting something from it.

This broad objective means that the artistic activities supported by institutions are decided by consensus (I once heard someone say that a camel was a horse designed by a committee). So it is doubtful that an institution, aiming at a consensus in its decisions, will set out to promote any activity that is likely to cause controversy. Controversy has shown itself to be an effective form of publicity, appropriate for building individual careers – in other words for the creation, in the final instance, of a cultural industry.

And although it is true that Barcelona lacks a cultural industry and that all we professionals in the art world would be delighted if it had one, it seems reasonable to think that this is a private responsibility and not a public one. What happens is that there are fewer and fewer entrepreneurs in the morally acceptable meaning of the term, i.e. someone who risks their capital. Unfortunately, it increase the type of persons who have no entrepreneurial spirit and only use their capital in secure investments, this is known as speculation.

The fact is that, in the current local scene, the largest amount of money invested in art comes from the public purse, i.e. the institutions.

It is true that art is suffering from acute scoliosis, but I don’t believe it is the responsibility of institutions to correct this, and nor do the means at their disposal seem an effective tool for doing so. All art professionals have to have the perception that they are welcomed by institutions, since the institutions represent them in an egalitarian way, and so we officials in charge of the management of the centres through which the institutions carry out their task of supporting art feel an obligation to make sure we are receptive to every work of art without applying a strictly personal viewpoint.

This is how it is and this is how it should be. At all events, the result is not very exciting.

An institution is obliged to support all types of cultural activities, and since in order to perform this duty it has to apply bland criteria, it ends by dissolving part of its capacity for validation, and the effort that the institution puts into promoting art is consequently ineffective. The result is that despite the large number of art centres we have, ratification of an art professional’s career still only occurs abroad. Let me be more specific: a French artist can have a consolidated career without having ever exhibited outside France. This does not apply in Spain, and much less in Catalonia.

And consequently – I warn you that I am continuing with my paranoid analysis – it seems that something close to boredom is beginning to set in. This is a perception that is in no way on the level of a “sociological study”. I don’t want to be nostalgic, or to defend other times, but even the inflated market of the 1980s, when artists were able to visualize a cash bonus, generated an enthusiasm that in the current scene has been lost.

I think someone is not doing their work, and it is not the institutions. One cannot ask the institutions to resolve the deficit that should be filled by the critics by generating ideas, by the artists by producing personal proposals, and by the market by internalising the risk. These are responsibilities that must be taken on by the private sector, for it is in the private sector that the right strategies for the effective implementation of the validation processes should be created.

*Kurt Cobain: Diarios, Mondadori, Barcelona, 2003, p. 128.

CASM vol. 3

CONSULTA

http://www.centredartsantamonica.net/

If I were running things here, my first action would be to close down the Ministry for Culture.

The Centre d’Art Santa Mònica was inaugurated in the mid eighties, at a time when institutional commitment to contemporary art in Barcelona was poor; it suffices to note that the MACBA did not open its doors until 1995.

Thus, the function that the Santa Mònica had to assume was of epic proportions, from staging historical overviews of the arts produced in Catalonia to hosting international travelling exhibitions, from video dance to La Primavera del Disseny.

The subsequent state of affairs, in which the city finds itself in today, when most of us would agree that the health of our art institutions is good —MACBA, CCCB, La Capella, Fundació Miró, Fundació Tàpies, CAIXAFORUM…— meant that the new phase that commenced in 2003 allowed the Santa Mònica to define its role. The logical course was for it to keep faith with its title of ART CENTRE and conduct itself as such.

The Santa Mònica is not a museum, in the sense that it does not have a collection. As a result, the exhibitions it puts on must uphold the commitment to showing new work, and articulating two objectives that reflect a single strategy: the consolidation of the professionalization of local cultural agents on the basis of the generation of contents. These two processes that inform the choice of exhibitions are divided on strictly geographical lines. International artists are asked for a project not previously shown in the Spanish state, and local artists are required to submit a new one.

If in the case of the international artists the emphasis is on the sketching out of a creative context, with the local artists the major commitment is to the production of new work. One result of this is that, looking back over these years, though only 35% of the artists that have presented their work in the Santa Mònica are local, the share of the budget allocated to their projects amounts to 70%.

The Consulta space was defined in terms of a similar line of thinking.

In the same way that the Art Centre has no collection of its own, when we set out to create a mediatheque, we took the view that the same logic argued against us having permanent holdings.

Another idea forcefully interacted with this first argument: that of the functional dynamics of the institutional structures for the presentation of art, where primacy attaches to the exhibition format. These structures regard the art institution as a continuation of the public space, their aim is to offer an extension of the walk or stroll, privileging the contemplative reception of the work of art in a pedestrian experience.

Mental note: the structures of power always want people to be in movement: ‘Keep moving, keep moving!’

The definition of Consulta was the creation of a space where critics and curators could present an idea in a format similar to that of a mediatheque. The action performed by the public in participating in this presentation format gave the space its name: Consulta.

The idea underlying the brief here is to aid the production of thought on the part of those agents who should be expected to think, because of their choice of profession. If the Santa Mònica’s diagnosis was that there was a lack of generation of content in the emission of local art, the logical therapy was to provide structures capable of helping the cultural agents to develop that content, offering them time for research and investigation, in the form of fees, and the authority of the institution’s backing to consolidate the contacts made in networking.

Having decided to devote a space in the Centre d'Art Santa Mònica to a curated mediatheque, there were other aspects to be determined, one of the fundamental issues being who was to endow it with content. The Consulta curator is selected according to three possibilities:

The Santa Mònica’s Activities department defines contents that will inform the different working formats to be implemented —workshops, lectures, seminars or the CASMdoc collection— and then looks for the right person to put these into practice. This is the first way.

Allow me a brief digression here: an illustration I like to use to help contextualize the way the commission to put together a Consulta is defined. In his book The Innocent Anthropologist Nigel Barley tells the story of the time his car got bogged down in what was supposed to have been a road but turned out to be a quagmire. He set off on foot for the nearest village, and found the local chief. He asked the chief if he would muster a few men to help him get his car out of the mud. The chief flatly refused. When Barley protested —‘But I thought you were the chief!’— the chief replied that of course he was, and that that was precisely why: because he never asked his people to do anything they didn’t want to.

This is the philosophy that permeates all the commissions I give for the preparation of a Consulta project.

The second possibility is that a curator approaches us with a proposal.

The fidelity to the format, the concordance of the contents and common sense are what make the proposal likely to be accepted.

Finally, the third category is that of the people we select for their perseverance, for their obsessive work, because they have spent a long time on a project or because they have had a great idea.

We give all of them the same watchwords.

A consultation space has to offer material whose absorption in full will probably take up ten hours. However, there is no reason why the visitors to the centre should have to coincide with the subject dealt with at a particular moment in order to be drawn into an exploration of this calibre, or why, not having sufficient time at their disposal, they should leave the space with the uneasy feeling of not having discovered anything that really interested them. Accordingly, the articulation of the information has to be posited on a script that affords an overall vision in less than 30 minutes, and that investing any additional time will be a positive decision made by the visitor on the basis of their own personal interest or curiosity.

Another of our watchwords is that we are working with documentation, so the artists should not impose constraints: though an artist has to have control over the presentation of their original work, they do not have to have the same control in the case of a poster, a flyer or a catalogue.

Consulta is a place in which to engage in depth with some aspect of art by way of documentation, not of artworks. Normally it consists of graphic documentation: poster, reproductions, slides (converted to digital format and screened using video projectors), a consultation computer with annotated and recommended links, books, magazines and a few videos; in the case of video, document and work are usually the same thing, at a scale of 1:1, so that a programme tends to be presented on a single monitor.

I had announced that the Consulta program is dissolved in the development of a thematic idea that pervades the whole of the Activities programme, in this case the over-exploitation of the exhibition model. I cut and paste from the introduction to the project Alternatives to the Exhibition that I posted on the website that sets out the working process, directed by Bea Herráez, and is embodied in a book in the CASMdoc collection.

I remember that when I was a student of Fine Art, whenever we talked about our work, we always referred to the series we were working on.

This was logical enough: the ideal outlet for our work was the gallery, and the galleries demanded, with perfect common sense, that the work of a particular artist should have a recognizable appearance.

So if I imagine myself as a buyer of art, who might be interested in a Tàpies, for example, I will want that it to be evidently a picture by Tàpies: I have no desire to own a Tàpies that could just as well not be a Tàpies, and I will choose a canvas in which the T or the cross or whatever it is that is represented by that sign that all Tàpies’s that are clearly Tàpies’s have, is unmistakably present.

This being so, for the sake of our possible future access to the commercial gallery circuit we were already applying ourselves to the production of series, and we were at pains to demonstrate a clear and individual style.

On this point, Forges explains that when he was starting out as a cartoonist he received a fundamental piece of advice: ‘make your drawings identifiable at fifteen metres.’

Art students these days no longer imagine showing in a gallery; instead, their fantasies are directed at the Art Centres and Museums, with the result that in the conversations to be heard in the cafeterias of art schools today, the kids talk about their ‘projects’, instead of their ‘series’, as my generation did.

The reason for this is that, in the context of the institution as the body issuing the art phenomenon, the formalization in the presentation of the work done in art which justifies the institution’s existence is that of the exhibition and as a result the demand is for ‘one artist-one project’. There has thus appeared a group of persons that have come to specialize in a new trade: that of the curator. Curating may be done by a critic, a thinker, an artist, and so on, and consists fundamentally, in overseeing or selecting the work of the artist or artists in order to present the works in the exhibition space. The curator’s trade makes no sense outside of the exhibition format, so the person who is most interested in putting on an exhibition is the person who wants to exercise his or her talents as a curator.

What I am driving at here is that the exhibition is consubstantial not with the artist or with the work of art but with the job of curator: an artist does not need an exhibition to be an artist, a work of art does not need to be exhibited to be an artwork, but a curator is a curator only in the act of staging an exhibition.

The activity Alternatives to the Exhibition is an attempt at cataloguing different modes of presentation and analysing their relative effectiveness so that the artist can decide on the presentation of the work in the way that is best suited to the work and exercise control over its expression.

This exercise of imagination has to be applied from the institution, in that it is the institution that is imposing the exhibition as the authoritative model of presentation of artistic practice, so that the institution itself manages to be broad enough a church to embrace different approaches to the presentation of the work done in art.

The treatment of the question of alternatives to the exhibition has recurred insistently. In the Audio season Jorge Luis Marzo was invited to put together a programme in/on the medium of radio —Hem pres the ràdio/We’ve taken the radio— and it also features in activities based on the presential work, and here we have recovered the AIRE Archive by Joan Casellas and Xavier Moreno presented in the Consulta space. Other Consultas such as The Rearguard of Eduardo Pérez Soler takes the contradictions of the exhibition format even further, questioning, in a highly polemical way, the art of today. Then there is Sensorama, by the members of what was the El Perro collective, which reveals a devastating truth: the structures of power need art as a channel for propaganda. Franz West without Franz West by Veit Loers, artists that, following in the wake of Franz West, steer well clear of hypertrophied productions. Copyfight by Oscar Abril Ascaso and Elástico is a lesson for those of us that believed all that stuff about the dissolution of authorship, showing its survival to be guaranteed by its efficacy to cash in on the artistic practice — a discourse that is found in other consultations, which will feature in forthcoming yearbooks, such as Please thanks you’re welcome: re-enactments by Víctor Palacios, which mixes appropriation with quotation and homage, or Merch & Promo by Quim Tarrida, which literally deals with the way artists convert their work into merchandising products so that when these are put into circulation at full tilt, the whole thing serves to promote the artist.

To return to the naive statement with which we started out: if I were running things here, my first action would be to close down the Ministry for Culture. And to be consistent with what an Art Centre, as opposed to a Museum, ought to be, I would create a Ministry for the Conservation of the Patrimony, which would be responsible for maintaining not only rivers and landscapes but also buildings and works of art, for producing a historiography and for ensuring free universal access. And at the same time I would create a Ministry for Research and Creative Industries, where art a commitment to the contemporary would not have to produce results but could just keep on going. ‘Keep moving, keep moving…’