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| There seems to be a contradiction between the need for quantitative, spectacular, high media-profile profitability required by institutions and the desire of the artist community to speculate and experiment. This is an issue that once again touches on the need to create frameworks for discussion, to work the context and come up with new formats for contemporary art. Martí Manen (curator, Barcelona, 1976), proposes a framework that goes beyond this binomial to recover a space of exchange, where both institutions and independent initiatives retain their own capacity for action. |
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MARTÍ MANEN
This is a time when we have to define cultural models. The official sector pledges itself to the big event with a high media profile, with unifying criteria and expected results. The artist community on the other hand operates on the basis of the artistic laboratory, seeing the basic needs prior to presentation as the framework of operations in which efforts, along with research, have to be concentrated. Unlike the immediate or short-term results necessary for a commercial approach to the cultural sector, a mentality based on knowledge and education aims much higher.
These are two models that could operate simultaneously, though the economic and political and historical conditioning factors are a major obstacle. The political tradition of mistrust of the electorate (and vice versa) introduces a vast distance between government agencies and reality. Cultural programmes tend to be based on political time rather than the temporal logic of culture. Political performance tends to overlook the specific needs of the sector, and the ways of gauging performance have increasingly less to do with ‘culture’ and more with marketing: how many messages have reached the population, how many visitors have seen what’s on offer. The criteria of quality disappear; the internal element of critique too. We find ourselves in Kafkaesque situations where programming takes place without the need to offer anything, with no connection to the artistic context and merely some few advertising messages. of the welfare being broadcast, denying any possibility of dialogue and blocking the process with excessive secrecy. It all depends, of course, whether there is dialogue at the root of it or whether the two sides see each other as enemies/rivals/a bother rather than co-producers
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It would be a mistake to hold the public sector alone responsible for difficulties in research or the creation of a laboratory. The independent sector all too frequently justifies itself by thinking of the shortcomings of the institutional field, and needing to constantly compare itself with the institution in order to exist and define itself. The generation of a context of discussion, dialogue, production and experimentation do not always require the institutional phenomenon, since the rhythm of the institution is quite different.
Seen from the independent corner, it seems as though
the final destination is habitually the institution.
Culture can be subsidized (the creation of a critical
society is an obligation on the part of society itself
and its governments ought therefore to encourage it),
but it often seems that government intentions become
confused with the institutions that represent them.
Institutional time is not the same as real time. The
very way the classic institution functions means that
it cannot respond to reality. The institution can accommodate
a very specific type of proposal, though the limits
seem to be broadening, but it is difficult for big
institutions to change the way they function and to
take up a position parallel to contemporary creation.
For this reason, there are ways of proceeding that
cannot be filtered by the institution, since the two
agents use absolutely different registers. And this
is no cause for concern —quite the opposite,
in fact.
The artist community has to define the way it acts outside the institution by participating in the creation of its own structures on which to hang its needs; otherwise, it seems impossible to create a real-time debate in which to present doubts and construct opinions on the basis of contact. The shortage of resources can further hinder this task, but if this really is the case, resources will be found because they are absolutely necessary. The basis here is not the idea of legitimization, in which the institutional sector and the market have a great deal to say, but a desire for construction and self-knowledge; for research and a degree of flexibility in the face of the ideas presented. The working discourses seem not to necessarily pass through the institution, since this body, as a space of presentation, tends to dress them up as exhibits for pure reasons of definition.
The exercise of construction starts out from the mutual recognition of a space of exchange beyond competitive logic directed by a mercantile concept of production.
The institutional field in the city of Barcelona effected a critical reading of its function and relation with the context. The exhibitions The End(s) of the Museum (Fundació Tàpies, 1995) and Views of the Museum (Macba, 1996) are two examples, but since then, with the focus of attention moving to the expository phenomenon, it seems that the review of functions was not carried out in keeping with local reality.
The critical reading by the institutional sector is apparently directed towards an attempt to form part of present-day cultural reality, more in keeping with the idea of working processes than the achievement of hard and fast results.
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We find institutions that have worked in accordance with this adaptation, seeking a degree of flexibility, encouraging experimentation and distancing themselves from a system based solely on displayable results, a new institutionalism more involved with the processes of production of knowledge and debate. The Rooseum in Malmö (with Charles Esche’s proposal) or Munich’s Kunstverein (with Maria Lind’s Sputniks project), and Sala Rekalde in Bilbao (as Chus Martínez commented in the seminars on ‘The state of structures’ at Hangar) are some examples of moments of experimentation on the part of the institutional world. Ideas such as Norway’s PNEK network or the Swedish Interactive Institute, with their desire to go beyond hierarchical structures in order to enable long-term research, allow contacts between the institutional world and independent research, in the long term, beyond academia. These are, however, small-format institutions, and the big international museums seem unable, or unwilling, to change the way they address the artistic phenomenon. The big institutions respond to the need to make history, and this inevitably distances them from a questioning approach and experimentation as working materials.
This new institutionalism seeks, in independent agents, keys to the identification of cultural reality.
Nevertheless, the institutional field should beware of appropriating independent structures or proposals, since their incorporation could
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deactivate their true function of weaving reality out of a model of collaboration based on experimentation, work and participation. The two worlds have to respect each other, accepting the other as a valid interlocutor. When institutional structures feel the urge to render situations visible in real time, collaboration has to be forthcoming from both sides. And we have to remember that there are proposals that may be undermined by the institutional sector, as the needs that characterize the institution may modify their rhythms and ways of proceeding.
The creation of opinions, doubt and the debate that it generates, and the contact between the various agents are, ultimately, the basis for a reading of the overall context, generating specific models of revision and organization of the artistic sector. In order to generate their own models, the various layers (be they institutional or independent) have to be defined as work spaces in themselves.
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