Kindness & Criticality

Text for Col­umn 4, pub­lished by Art­space Syd­ney (Ed. Reuben Kee­han). A response to Spaces of Art, 2009 inter­na­tional con­fer­ence held at the Art Gallery of NSW & Art­space, Sydney.

Anton Vidokle has pointed out recently that the notion long held by almost all artists, writ­ers and cre­ative prac­ti­tion­ers that they were work­ing towards a pro­gres­sive social future, has come to an end[i]. This shared project and pro­jected future has been stymied and per­verted, in part by the impact of neo-liberalism, the indi­vid­u­al­i­sa­tion of iden­tity, and the frag­men­ta­tion and explo­sion of com­mu­nity from geog­ra­phy in the infor­ma­tion age.

It’s inter­est­ing to con­sider the mov­ing and gen­er­ous pre­sen­ta­tion by Ly Dar­avuth at Spaces of Art in light of this obser­va­tion. He detailed the activ­i­ties of Reyum Insti­tute of Con­tem­po­rary Arts, of which he is Direc­tor and co-founder, and the con­text in which it oper­ates in Cam­bo­dia. Hav­ing been edu­cated in France, Dar­avuth returned to his coun­try of birth and began Reyum in 1998 with the late Ingrid Muan, oper­at­ing in a con­text he describes as ‘pre-institutional’. It seems they tried to fill every gap they could. They pre­sented work by Cam­bo­dian con­tem­po­rary artists, while also reach­ing out to the local com­mu­nity, research­ing and devel­op­ing ethno­graphic exhi­bi­tions that were sur­veys of local his­to­ries, and the tra­di­tional tech­niques and tools of the Khmer peo­ple. Infor­ma­tion that was in dan­ger being lost to the post Khmer Rouge com­mu­nity due to a lack of doc­u­men­ta­tion. They addressed this lack too, pub­lish­ing ambi­tious cat­a­logues to accom­pany these projects, and with few books avail­able in Khmer, they began pub­lish­ing children’s books in the lan­guage too. Amaz­ingly they also estab­lished a free art school for chil­dren in this mod­est set­ting, offer­ing a four-year course, which extended to com­mis­sions and cul­tural exchange projects. A notable per­for­mance project Dar­avuth detailed was a four-year col­lab­o­ra­tion with Japan­ese chore­o­g­ra­phers Eiko and Koma which cul­mi­nated in the par­tic­i­pat­ing chil­dren tour­ing the work through­out the USA. Reyum equates to a pro­found under­tak­ing, and many of us were struck by its equally pro­found, seri­ous and kind natured Director.

In their book ‘On Kind­ness’ Adam Phillips and Bar­bara Tay­lor argue that kind­ness has been down­graded into a ‘minor­ity moti­va­tion’[ii], allowed for in moth­ers or via a god or gods, and oth­er­wise sus­pect or a sign of weakness.

I can’t help think­ing there’s some­thing in there that relates closely to reimag­in­ing the insti­tu­tions of art. In our con­tem­po­rary age the agency a com­mu­nity has to enact kind­ness might be via the insti­tu­tion rather than via a god, more specif­i­cally those art insti­tu­tions (pre– or post-) that embrace soci­etal prac­tices and projects that engage their com­mu­ni­ties. How though can one embrace crit­i­cal­ity and kind­ness in equal mea­sures? Can the future museum ever be seen in this light?[iii]

The embed­ding of a prac­tice and pro­gram within the com­mu­nity, respond­ing to a com­mu­nity, reflect­ing or cri­tiquing a com­mu­nity from within it, these are all preva­lent strate­gies in con­tem­po­rary artis­tic prac­tice. They were con­cepts touched upon reg­u­larly within the con­text of the con­fer­ence in a form of short­hand[iv]. There were many of us attend­ing whose day-to-day work is nego­ti­at­ing pre­cisely these praxes, and Spaces of Art was punc­tu­ated with descrip­tions of projects and out­comes that sim­i­larly tra­verse these out­crops, and which con­tinue to resur­face since those two days in April.

The City­Cat Project on the Bris­bane River by US artist David Hull­fish Bai­ley, curated and elo­quently pre­sented at Spaces of Art by David Pesto­rius, was a fas­ci­nat­ing case in point. City­Cat Project con­sisted of a pub­lic ‘per­for­mance’ inter­ven­tion; a re-direction of a ferry route and a sub­se­quent greet­ing of the ves­sel and pas­sen­gers by a group from the local indige­nous com­mu­nity from the shore­line, at a place and in a man­ner con­ceived by Bris­bane based abo­rig­i­nal activist Sam Wat­son. The sig­nif­i­cance of this project was fur­ther inten­si­fied when it was deemed of such impor­tance to the local Abo­rig­i­nal com­mu­nity as to become a Dream­ing story, to be told and re-told, and poten­tially to be re-enacted, in the future.

Lis­ten­ing to David Cross present the expan­sive One Day Sculp­ture pro­gram, and speak­ing with him between ses­sions about it, was a lit­tle like meet­ing one’s twin in the street (or per­haps more accu­rately in the KFC in Haw­era, South Taranaki). Con­ceived by Claire Doherty of Sit­u­a­tions, and David rep­re­sent­ing the Lit­mus Research Ini­tia­tive, the pro­gram con­sisted of twenty-four artists and col­lab­o­ra­tive teams, each com­mis­sioned (by twelve organ­i­sa­tions) to present a project on a sin­gle day, and held over the course of twelve months across New Zealand. This dis­plays pre­cisely the brand of ill-advised ambi­tion I am reg­u­larly guilty of, and it was such a plea­sure to share the mania of that expe­ri­ence with a kin­dred spirit like David, while argu­ing the rel­a­tive strengths of the many dif­fer­ent artis­tic strate­gies that the project embraces. Pre­sent­ing this mul­ti­plic­ity of approach, and assess­ing the dif­fer­ent kinds of impact result­ing from each, is key to the com­plex­ity and ongo­ing impor­tance of One Day Sculp­ture.

The model employed by One Day Sculp­ture bears a close rela­tion­ship to a struc­ture of project or pro­gram that I raised in my pre­sen­ta­tion at Spaces of Art, and which I’ve termed the Emer­gent Project model. This involves set­ting up a frame­work that allows mul­ti­ple insti­tu­tions to come together to present a wide pro­gram of activ­i­ties (such as exhi­bi­tions, per­for­mances, events, screen­ing pro­grams, work­shops, res­i­den­cies, pub­li­ca­tions and sym­posia in the exam­ples I refer to below), and ref­er­ences the con­cept of emer­gence as coined by the philoso­pher George Henry Lewes. Emer­gence refers to the way com­plex sys­tems can arise out of a mul­ti­plic­ity of sim­ple inter­ac­tions or rela­tion­ships, whereby the whole forms more (or less!) than the sum of its parts. The under­ly­ing struc­ture of an Emer­gent Project like One Day Sculp­ture, Rapt! or Mak­ing Space[v] is fur­ther revealed when self-organising enti­ties come together to present a com­plex shared event, embrac­ing mul­ti­plic­ity, indi­vid­u­al­ity and retain­ing their unique natures, while avoid­ing con­ver­gence in both artis­tic pro­gram­ming and ongo­ing infra­struc­tures. In the con­text of the ideas raised in this paper, the Emer­gent Project allows insti­tu­tions to work out­side their nor­mal pro­gram­ming in exploratory ways with their com­mu­nity or to sit­u­ate their activ­i­ties within com­mu­ni­ties they may not nor­mally engage. This has the poten­tial to simul­ta­ne­ously allow for crit­i­cal dis­tance from the institution’s reg­u­lar approach to their oper­a­tions, with­out the need to ‘out­source’ their con­tent[vi], and to extend their pro­gram­ming at lit­tle or no recur­rent cost.

At Satel­lite, our ambi­tion is work with artists to develop and present soci­etal projects and pro­grams imbed­ded within com­mu­ni­ties (whether geo­graphic com­mu­ni­ties or com­mu­ni­ties of ideas). With luck these activ­i­ties con­tribute to the wider effort to reclaim com­mu­nity and art from ‘com­mu­nity artists’ (along with ‘Pub­lic Art’ from ‘Pub­lic Artists’), where it seems these notions lan­guish within the acad­e­mies, Gov­ern­ment agen­cies, local coun­cils and other stake­hold­ers in Australia’s cul­tural infra­struc­ture. No doubt this will be a long process, but we hope these projects may con­tribute to the dis­cov­ery and pur­suit of a ‘com­mon social project of our times’[vii]. Spaces of Art cer­tainly pro­vided fer­tile ground for seed­ing many of these ideas.

  1. This was in the con­text of Vidokle dis­cussing future plans for e-flux, one of the ini­tia­tives raised by Nina Mönt­mann in her paper on alter­na­tive mod­els. Email con­ver­sa­tion between Hans Ulrich Obrist, Anton Vidokle, and Juli­eta Aranda, July 2006, pub­lished as Ever. Ever. Ever. in ‘The Best Sur­prise Is No Sur­prise’, JRP|Ringier press, 2007. [↩]
  2. ‘On Kind­ness’, Adam Phillips & Bar­bara Tay­lor, 2009, Pen­guin. [↩]
  3. It is inter­est­ing to con­sider Cedric Price’s prac­tice and ideas in this con­text, his ‘Fun Palace’, the propo­si­tions of Gen­er­ous Archi­tec­ture, and the pro­posal for a pavil­ion in Perth, West­ern Aus­tralia, ‘A gallery for an unselfish man’. [↩]
  4. Given the wide famil­iar­ity with such ideas, it was refresh­ing at Spaces of Art to move imme­di­ately into sub­stan­tia­tive dis­cus­sion with­out too much pre­am­ble. It cer­tainly made for a much denser and more pro­duc­tive two-day con­fer­ence than might oth­er­wise have been the case. [↩]
  5. Two projects I men­tion as exam­ples with which I was closely involved, Rapt! 20 Con­tem­po­rary Artists from Japan (2006) and Mak­ing Space: artist run ini­tia­tives in Vic­to­ria (2007), each involved 20+ organ­i­sa­tions. [↩]
  6. This of course directly ref­er­ences Isabell Lorey’s fas­ci­nat­ing paper at the con­fer­ence in which she argued that in the act of retain­ing inde­pen­dence from the insti­tu­tion the free­lance cura­tor was in fact sub­ju­gat­ing them­selves to the neo-liberalist agenda via an act of self-precarization. [↩]
  7. cf Obrist, Vidokle, Aranda, 2007. [↩]