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Prospect: No Worries
Ian Wedde
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Prospect: a tactical withdrawal
from or advance beyond its near eponym, 'perspecta' and
the Latinate markers of the modernist academy implicit in
'documenta'. 'Prospect' is a good word and a good title
for the times: its optimism packs in the idea of a fresh,
encompassing view, something to look forward to, some fun,
and a quest for the real oil (or gold). It has a sense of
elevation, as well as of common usage. As it's surely intended
to, it offers a brand capable of repetition, but not neutral.
It implies a renegotiation of the terms of reference for
the biennial or triennial type exhibition. Its official
predecessor in 2001 [i]
assembled an eclectic,
curator-driven sampling of current art practice, and made
a virtue of its lack of 1990s-style anxiety over contemporariness
by incorporating the recent work of senior artists such
as Milan Mrkusich, as much to demonstrate that they, too,
remain fresh, as to provide a sense of historicity. It also
avoided thematic dogmatism (national identity, cultural
theory, narrative), and managed to reconcile top- down academy
style selection with official culture (the canonical presence
of work by iconic artists). Lara Strongman's curatorial
note to the exhibition used the 'great white swan hunt'
for a whimsical work by Gavin Chilcott to deflate Melvillesque
portentousness; the swan 'occupied a place in the real world
as well as in the academy', and it exhibited 'good humoured
resistance to dominant contemporary paradigms'.[ii]
Some critics found the exhibition miscellaneous. Maybe art
is. Its tone was pleasurable rather than pedagogic, another
aspect of the Prospect brand that bears thinking about.
So let's think about it.
It may be that Allan Smith began the thinking in 1995 when
he curated what was a kind of ur-Prospect for City
Gallery Wellington, A Very Peculiar Practice: Aspects
of Recent New Zealand Painting.[iii]
The title of this exhibition already suggested an intentional
split - the interesting, gently punning hook, followed by
a familiarly pedagogic, Gordon Brown-esque tag-line: we
will intrigue you, and then inform you. This was a crucial
instruction on how to read the discourse model of the exhibition.
Concentrating specifically on painting as a complex, historical
practice, Smith was careful early on to establish what the
exhibition was not interested in doing. A key epigraph to
his catalogue essay quoted Dietmar Kamper ('Art ceases to
be a question of current fashionability'...)[iv];
Smith went on to assert that 'The significance of painting
... depends on more than the changing fortunes of art world
bids for eminence and hegemony.'[v]
Other language in this essay revealed Smith's intention
to position the exhibition as a critique of the cultural
polity; to investigate the leverage of such terms as 'the
history of painting', 'a dominant cultural institution',
'shared public realm', 'legacy', and 'social landscape'.
These are all terms that thrust or veer past the taxonomies
of art history or the reductive categories of a national
canon. They reveal a desire to look at painting - the most
familiar 'fine art' practice - within an extended social
and cultural field. If this discourse now has any obvious
coloration, it is the anxiety of the late 1990s: a combined
worry about the final unreadability of the late post-modern's
'empire of signs', relevance, contemporaneity, and an expanding
visual culture field. Even then, such anxiety had given
way in many quarters to blithe, collaborative, cross-disciplinary
behaviour by younger artists: in 1995 it was Ronnie van
Hout who was the stand-out peculiar, mocking his own 'anxiety'
(I'm with Stupid, Stupid's with me 1993); in 2004
it is hard to imagine Sriwhana Spong (and the ex-Pussies),
or Hannah and Aaron Beehre (and Pine) - who were present
in Telecom Prospect 2001 - or Daniel Malone, being
co-opted to such concerns. Prospect can continue
to investigate a wide cultural polity as well as diverse
practice; but it needn't worry about it, and has said it
doesn't intend to.
Today (as I begin to write) is the 22nd of March, 2004.
On the 22nd of March 1824 the British Parliament voted to
purchase 38 paintings to establish a National Art Gallery.
The idea of civic or official culture wasn't new: the revolutionary
transformation of the Louvre, until 1682 a residence of
the kings of France, into the Museum of the Republic in
1793 was a political act that anticipated the reverse redistribution
of art treasures to the provinces by Jacques Lang, the former
leftist French Minister of Culture, two hundred years later.
But the idea of a national collection directly, rather than
rhetorically, sponsored by an elected national (or local)
body was a new idea. It linked with a Victorian ethos,
at once paternalistic and an effect of nineteenth century
capitalism, which believed that the masses should be educated
and that educated masses would contribute to economic productivity
(an idea that has familiar echoes in the current, etiolated
jargon of 'knowledge society' and 'creative city').
At this time, ordinary literacy was the preserve of the
middle and upper classes, as out of reach for most citizens
as were the art collections of the aristocracy, or the activities
of the Royal Academy, or university-administered collections
such as Oxford's Ashmolean. Somewhat more within reach were
the collections (and exhibitions) that shared a border with
popular entertainment, such as the botanical curiosities
of Kew Gardens, and the animals (and humans) paraded as
zoological or ethnological exotica - still, in themselves,
the byproducts of scholarly investigations. And even though
the 'elected' representatives of the people in Britain in
1824 were effectively elected by class-, property-, and
gender- exclusive voters, the idea that official culture
might be made available to all through the economic agency
of government was still a new one.
The great Crystal Palace exposition of 1851 was the nineteenth
century's most spectacular display of the confluence of
Imperial capital, Victorian paternalism, public entertainment,
and scholarly collecting. It revealed flows as well as tensions
between entertainment, learning, institutional collecting,
and sensation, which have persisted in many subsequent exhibitions,
not least the Brilliant! New Art from London at the
Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, in 1996, and its British
Council sponsored successor Pictura Britannica: Art from
Britain in 1998. The controversy that erupted when the
latter was staged at Te Papa was richly symptomatic of the
tensions as well as the flows. However, the controversy
obscured the complexity of exchanges by reducing them to
a trite stand- off between 'artistic freedom' (the academy),
and 'public understanding' (the non-art audience), with
the museum (official culture) stuck in the middle as an
advocate for both. This over-simplification continues to
haunt much official cultural policy. It has also spooked
many large, anthologizing, explanatory exhibitions, some
of which have become catastrophically trapped in it, for
example the gargantuan 1989 Bilderstreit: Widerspruch,
Einheit und Fragment in der Kunst seit 1960 [vi]
and its antipodean near-relative, The Readymade Boomerang:
Certain Relations in 20th Century Art. [vii]
Even newer than the idea of official culture opening the
academy to public access would have been the idea that government
(including local government) should support culture as (s)elected
by voters. This idea would have to wait - indeed it's still
waiting, except where the complex and often conflicted exigencies
of commercial drivers, cost of supply, programme or territory
competition, and Reithian public service ethics, [viii]produce
partial and inconsistent acceptances of consumer-driven
public culture. Examples of this may be found in New Zealand
On Air-supported television in New Zealand, or in the exhibition
schedules of Te Papa. In these zones of cultural programming
(as, often, within the expositional, carnivalesque zone
of the contemporary biennial-type exhibition), the tensions
and exchanges between the academy, official, public, and
popular culture, are rich, complex, and potentially dynamic,
if not rendered inert by risk-aversion, or undemocratic
by political or class interference.
The connections and mis-connections between pedagogy, class,
taste, literacy, capital, cultural production, official
culture, public culture, and popular culture, have been
much discussed in relation to what John Miller has called
'The Show You Love to Hate'.[ix]
The conceptual and professional trajectories of celebrity
'mega-exhibition' curators such as Harald Szeemann, Rudi
Fuchs and René Block have also been much discussed,
in relation both to their late-modernist practice through
the heyday of the documenta type exhibition in the 1970s
and early 80s, and also in relation to their subsequent
retrenchments around materiality, history, and the museum
collection (in part an academic reaction against the relativism
of post-modernity). What's less often discussed is the rift
between the idea of the conversationalist academy of the
eighteenth century (and its institutions such as the Ashmolean),
and the idea of pedagogic public-good collections of the
nineteenth, and the ways in which this rupture resembles
the one that took place between the late-modernist- academy
style but collection-free 'mega-exhibitions' of the 1970s
and early 80s (including on-the-cusp meditations such as
Jean-François Lyotard's Les Immateriaux in 1985,
the filmic materiality of Peter Greenaway, or the somewhat
earlier activism of Judy Chicago) and later radical reinvestigations
of the collection as a place of public meaning, learning
and resistance by artist-curators including Clementine Deliss,
Ivan Karp, and, most famously, Fred Wilson. Also relevant
to the current status of 'mega-exhibitions' are the cautious
extensions of a modified modernist academy found in the
museological approaches of Lars Nittve at the Louisiana
Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, or at the Tate Modern, and
the sympathetic 'relevance' criteria of Peter Jenkinson
and Elizabeth Ann McGregor in the north of England, notably
at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, where contemporary art was
seen as the most critical, imaginative, and successful way
of engaging with the community. The entertaining but pathological
extreme of this ' relevance' approach may have been reached
in Christoph Grunenberg's and Max Hollein's mammoth Shopping:
A Century of Art and Consumer Culture in 2002-03.[x]
What's also seldom been discussed in relation to the, let's
call it 'electivity' of public culture, is the way in which
works of art join the company of the elect - works of art
whose canonical quality is the exclusive product of neither
academy-style nor of public good- or public service-style
visibility, access, and citation, but of other forces. Both
academy and public service decision-making in respect of
what will be shown to the public, where and when it will
be shown, and how the cited iterations of quality benchmarks
will be managed, tend to leave out or skirt forces more
often associated with the consumerism disliked by Lord Reith.
These other forces include nationalist marketing and reification,
narrativisation, and populist metonymy: semiotic agents
usually associated with grandiose, mainstream and popular
national cultures such as the Hollywood/Bollywood movie,
or the 'dominions of signs' (to borrow from Nick Perry)
which are assembled within mainstream media, especially
commercial television, and especially television advertising.[xi]
It's here that popular icons such as New Zealand television's
current advertising craze, the semi-rural Kiwi bloke, are
fabricated, often providing artists with satirical or homage
roughage. The fact that the semi-rural bloke's representativeness
is in inverse proportion to the majority urbanized population
is, of course, symptomatic of the mythologizing forces that
generate public culture, epitomized in Saatchi's immortal
'Bugger' ads for Toyota.
An engagingly peculiar example of this - a different kind
of semi-rural bloke and sheila - is Thomas Gainsborough's
famous painting Mr. and Mrs. Andrews of 1750. Having
spent its life out of the public gaze, the painting entered
an official culture domain in the Gainsborough bicentenary
exhibition at Ipswich Museum in 1927, but became 'elect'
within public culture as one of the images reproduced to
brighten up British Home Guard canteens on the home front
during the Second World War. Its emotional use as a highly
recognisable nationalist rallying image was endorsed when
it was exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951, a brilliantly
positioned and crafted 'mega-exhibition' event that fused
history, patriotism, and modernist progressivism, and that
also managed to fuse official, public, and academy culture,
largely through the agency of works of art such as Mr.
and Mrs. Andrews. It was inevitable that the painting
should officially enter the public domain, and it did when
the National Gallery purchased it in 1960. It's now one
of the best known, most recognized, and most reproduced
icons of the English painting canon.
What is the process of legitimation through which such a
transformation of cultural ownership and value takes place?
The question is relevant to a discussion of the current
status and value of biennial-type exhibitions, poised as
such exhibitions are between selective and elective
agendas - or, as I suggested earlier, sometimes trapped
in a stupid stand-off between 'artistic freedom' and 'public
understanding'. I suspect the questions continue to haunt
the curators of post-heyday Biennales, including their major
successors, the Asian behemoths - and that, as a brand,
Prospect is an anxiety-diffusing strategy.
What are the terms whose anxiety-inducing properties need
to be diffused? Since, in 1995, Allan Smith opened up a
discussion of the cultural polity, we might begin by charting
this polity's structure. The terms 'academy', 'official
culture', and 'public culture', are useful without being
reliable - their borders are vague, and the tensions between
them are creative rather than exclusive, just as it's the
tension between artistic freedom and public understanding
that makes encounters with contemporary art interesting.
I'm with Nick Perry again when he writes of the need, in
New Zealand, to think with non-oppositional, and non-binary,
'third terms':
[The third term is] a term that refuses the opposition
between state monopoly and market uniformity, between political
direction and commercial manipulation, between high culture
and mass culture, between global and local, in favour of
acknowledging the diversity of civil society, the facilitation
of plurality, the complexity of the popular, and the cosmopolitanism
of the local.[xii]
What the 'third term(s)' might be, or might become, is an
interesting question to ask in the context of Prospect
since, like New Zealand television, it's the product of
combined academy, public good, government (in this case local
authority), and market forces ( including sponsorship). In
order to explore what benefit these stakeholders derive from
Prospect's ability to generate a 'third term', we need
to define the 'third term' generating forces.
The specialist culture of the academy as an exclusive domain
of peer discourse produces lateral selection - peers choosing
each other. The brand values of the academy affirm and protect
the complicit class distinction of both producers and consumers.
The artist's signature adds value to their class; they add
value to the signature's exclusivity, its quality control
value. The academy game-makers in modern-day New Zealand
may be found within a small, wealthy, highly influential
lobby of private collectors and benefactors. While their
relationship with key opinion-leading dealers, 'collectable'
artists, and intellectuals may appear symbiotic, in fact
it's frequently they who run the shop in an economy the
size of New Zealand's, where the most interesting new art
is often, however, found in the dry above major capital
flows.
Reithian public service or public good official culture
generates pedagogic, top-down selection. Official culture
brand values affirm the improving, paternalistic, public-good
role of academy culture as the arbiter of official taste.
The artist's signature becomes the property of the State,
signifying civic virtue. The official culture game-makers
in modern-day New Zealand are state agencies, including
the Ministry of Culture and Creative New Zealand. There
would appear to be 'no surprises' clauses embedded in the
contracting of many official culture initiatives. The Minister
of Culture's recent characterization of global research
into hip-hop as 'silliness' is possibly symptomatic of ignorance;
it is certainly symptomatic of paternalistic quality-control
and the politicizing of cultural selection - election
as determined by popular consumption and global cultural
economies doesn't get a look-in. Art that deliberately or
involuntarily defies definition within official culture
('outsider art', the art of cultural or social minorities,
ephemeral and time-based art, taxonomically unruly or cross-disciplinary
art, provocative political art, etc) is seldom given official
accreditation, except through the processes of 'kitsch',
'naïve', 'folk', or 'avant-garde' reprogramming; exoticising
shifts which position their advocates as discriminating
rather than the art itself as inherently interesting or
valuable.
Public culture combines market forces and populist metonymy
to produce nationalist, recognition-value-rich, bottom-up
election - usually, however, influenced initially by agencies
of official culture. The brand values of public culture
affirm the broad, metonymic relevance of national cultural
icons. The artist's signature becomes national identity
property, signifying collective national distinction.
Public culture game-makers in modern-day New Zealand will
tend to be aligned with investment and entrepreneur economies,
rather than with the economies of entitlement usually associated
with subsidized 'culture'. They will be found among the
'creative industries' of tourism, advertising, independent
film, television, and design production, and national niche-marketing.
A significant 'third term' paradox of public culture is
its unconcern with local-global slippage: a Toyota Hi-Lux
may be the chariot of choice for semi-rural Kiwi blokes,
Adidas the brand of choice for national sporting heroes,
and an unsullied, sublime, primeval, depopulated, Burkean
mountainscape the backdrop of choice for a Prime Minister
leading the Pacific's largest, mostly urban, multicultural,
hip-hoppy, and increasingly Asianised, island society. Sharing
the public culture game-maker limelight with creative entrepreneurs
will be national and regional agencies that want creative
capital to endorse their brands: 'the government', city
councils, local product (or content) promoters, and identity
impresarios. There will always, however, be art whose identity
within public culture is opaque, which doesn't add recognition
value to a national brand, and which doesn't necessarily
have an attitude to such potential co-option - art that
may often best be described as 'casual': unconcerned about
'production values', often collaborative, quirky, conceptual.
We haven't talked about popular culture, whose makers and
consumers don't think hip-hop is silly, and whose audiences
may be stubborn when it comes to consuming Reithian public
service television. Popular culture isn't interested in
the weird transgenic identity forged by public (and official)
culture in rebranding New Zealand as an economic miracle
Middle-Earth repositioned as a primeval landscape with hidden
geniuses; it just enjoys the movie and thinks Peter Jackson
is cool. Public culture seeks popular culture's audience
loyalty and disposable income, and knows that the audience's
willingness to spend its wages on entertainment is the only
way out of the 'culture of entitlement'.
How can Prospect substitute enjoyment for the anxiety
that builds up around these positions; what are the third
terms that will engage with complexity rather than establish
dumb binary stand-offs; and where are the artists (unmentioned
as yet) in all this?
Another case study: It was a gallery director's vision (Doug
Hall's) that fused the apparently serendipitous combination
of wealthy cultural philanthropist (the Myer Family), Commonwealth
Government economic agendas for cultural diplomacy in Asia,
Queensland Government agendas for regional brand development,
and the international rise of art from Asia, into the sequence
of events that came to be known as the APT; the Asia-Pacific
Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. The
key stakeholders here are as above: an academy linking collector
wealth (Myer) and professional selection (curators and dealers);
official culture interested in rebranding Australia as part
of a new, Asia-Pacific region and keen to encourage public
acceptance of and knowledge about the region (what might
be called the 'art with dipping sauce' strategy); and public
culture interests vested in the Government of Queensland
and, eventually, the City of Brisbane. Prominent among the
sponsors and supporters have been Australia's major cultural
agencies, the cultural foundations and agencies of contributing
countries, and major tourism, education, and broadcasting
interests. In 1993, when I attended the first APT exhibition,
the audience was small, specialised, and sceptical. In particular,
they were sceptical of the official and public culture motives
of the project, especially its apparent economic drivers,
and the sense of Australian hegemonic interests in this
rather suddenly embraced geo-cultural proposition. The exhibition
experience was really a suite of privileged encounters between
the specialist audience and the artists. The citizens of
Brisbane were largely absent, and the only on-floor interpretive
context provided was a reductive regional map in which contributors
were defined by nation, ethnicity, state religion, etc -
an imperial taxonomy which many of the artists found offensive.
The fourth APT in 2002 represented the probable culmination
of a twelve-year arc. While much reduced in scope from its
three predecessors, it was notable for several things. First,
it had by now won the pride of a large citizen audience
- the town came en masse to the two huge, generous bashes
with which the exhibition opened. Like the art, don't like
the art, who cares - this is happening in our town, it's
weird and interesting, and you get to see it every three
years. Second, there was a sense of ease in the audience's
acceptance of the project's major premise - that a relationship
with Asian cultures is both interesting and appropriate
- remarkable given Queensland's well-known propensity for
One-Nation racism. Third, the project had immensely assisted
public culture's investment in a Queensland Gallery of Modern
Art, including the Australian Centre for Asia-Pacific Art,
scheduled to open in 2005, with a collection substantially
built through the APT process. Fourth, the initiative had
almost certainly been the key driver of cultural urban renewal
initiatives by the City of Brisbane. And fifth, there was
a clear sense of loyalty, pleasure, and appreciation among
the artists.
There was an overall sense that by sustaining and linking
the interests of its key stakeholders, remaining relaxed
about their different agendas - playing to rather than stressing
out over tensions between them - being hospitable to audiences
and artists, and keeping its nerve and patience with respect
to long-term objectives, the APT had nurtured a set of third
terms. These were mostly to do with pleasure and the public
domain of museum scholarship. The APT respected the expertise
of its curators, and audiences came to enjoy the sense of
discovery and encounter the event provided, rather than
feel excluded. It made the pedagogic goals of official culture
pleasurable and inclusive - interpretation and education
facilities around the fourth APT were exceptional, and widely
used by families with kids. It encouraged the public culture
stakeholders to open the event up to a wide audience, and
supported this with loud, carnivalesque parties, at which
art performances were presented as entertainment, and regional
cuisines served free and in bulk. It included artists in
hospitality and free public programmes wherever possible.
The third terms were the products of processes, and often
were processes in themselves - not states or positions.
They were cumulative and mutual, and resulted more from
mistakes and patience than from instant solutions. There
was a sense, at the fourth APT, that the project's long-term
objectives had always been relatively clear, had remained
consistent, and were finite.
What might Prospect do to establish long-term objectives,
find the patience to sustain a consistent vision, and open
itself up without anxiety to 'third terms'? If its emerging
mission is to regularly dip-stick new art in New Zealand,
it (and its audiences) might continue on tracks opened in
1995 and 2001 by asking the following questions:
What is the art produced and advocated for within the capital
flows of the academy? What are its alternatives? How do
they differ from, and relate to, each other?
What are the key markers of official culture today? What
alternatives to official culture are apparent at present?
What processes are under way to co-opt them officially?
What are the refusals?
What art has public culture visibility
and acceptance? What is the art that won't be nationalized,
whose identity within public culture is opaque, which doesn't
add recognition value to a national brand - which is 'casual'?
And finally, what are popular culture audiences looking
at? How does this relate to the other cultural spheres?
How does it continue to inflect the other spheres' priorities?
Notes
i Telecom Prospect 2001: New Art New
Zealand, curator Lara Strongman, City Gallery Wellington,
11 April - 1 July 2001.
ii Lara Strongman, curatorial statement
for Telecom Prospect 2001, http://www.city-gallery.org.nz/mainsite/Prospect2001.htm
iii A Very Peculiar Practice: Aspects
of Recent New Zealand Painting, curator Allan Smith,
City Gallery Wellington, 10 June - 3 September, 1995.
iv 'Art ceases to be a question of current
fashionability and presents itself as grappling with the
dread that we could forfeit all connection with other human
beings, as a result of a lack of shared perceptions.' Dietmar
Kamper, 'At the End of an Age of Mirrors', Flash Art
157, March/April 1991, pp. 85-87.
v Allan Smith, 'A Very Peculiar Practice:
A User's Guide', A Very Peculiar Practice: Aspects of
Recent New Zealand Painting, Wellington: City Gallery
Wellington, 1995, p.6.
vi Translates as Picture-argument: Opposition,
Unity and Fragment in Art since 1960. Curated by Carmen
Gimenez (Kultusministerium Madrid), Knud W. Jensen (Louisiana
Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek), and Nicholas Serota (The
Tate Gallery, London). Staged under the auspices of the
Ludwig Museums, Cologne, at the Kolner Messe, 8 April -
28 June 1989.
vii The Readymade Boomerang: Certain
Relations in 20th Century Art (Art is Easy). Curated
by René Block as The Eighth Biennale of Sydney.
Staged under the auspices of the Biennale of Sydney at the
Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Bond Stores, 11
April - 3 June 1990.
viii Lord Reith was the first Director
General of the BBC. He is credited with the concept of Public
Service Broadcasting, whose remits have been rather vaguely
defined as to ' inform, educate, and entertain'. Reith saw
entertainment as a minor goal, but ( paternalistically)
the education of viewers and listeners in matters of taste
in entertainment as a major one. Reith viewed the advent
of commercial television in Britain in 1956 with alarm,
and Reithian doctrine has continued to advocate for a public
service definition of audiences as citizens not consumers.
ix John Miller, 'The Show You Love to Hate:
a psychology of the mega-exhibition', in Reesa Greenberg,
Bruce W Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (eds.) Thinking About
Exhibitions, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 269-275.
x Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer
Culture. Curatorium directed by Christoph Grunenberg
(Tate Liverpool) and Max Hollein (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt).
Staged at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 28 September - 1 December
2002, and Tate Liverpool 20 December - 23 March 2003.
xi Nick Perry, The Dominion of Signs:
Television, Advertising and Other New Zealand Fictions,
Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994.
xii Nick Perry, '"Getting the Picture":
State Regulation, Market Making, and Cultural Change in
the New Zealand Television System', in Roger Horrocks and
Nick Perry (eds.) Television in New Zealand: Programming
the Nation, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2004,
pp. 74-90.
© City Gallery Wellington and the author, 2004.
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