Museums of the Commons: L’Internationale and the Crisis of Europe 9780367901356, 9781003022831

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MUSEUMS OF THE COMMONS L’INTERNATIONALE AND THE CRISIS OF EUROPE Nikos Papastergiadis

Museums of the Commons

Museums of the Commons examines L’Internationale, an ongoing confederation between six museums and contemporary art institutions in Europe. Drawing on extensive interviews with the directors, curators, public programs officers in all the museums, as well as artists, critics and members associated with them, the book provides a transversal account that connects the ideas across the various institutions and situates this in the wider visual and social context. Chronicling the challenges faced by the museums, Papastergiadis goes on to situate their responses within the wider political and cultural context that is shaping the future of all contemporary art museums. Five key domains of research are explored within the book: the genealogy of the museum; the need for alternative models of trans-​institutional governance; examples of innovation in the spaces of aesthetic production; experimentation in the forms of partnership and engagement with constituents; and finally, examination of the impact of a collaborative and collective regime of artistic practices. Museums of the Commons provides a multi-​perspectival account of a trans-​ institutional and transnational collaboration, which will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of Museum Studies, Cultural Studies, Art History, Media and Communication. Nikos Papastergiadis is Professor of Media and Communication and Director of the Research Unit of Public Cultures at the University of Melbourne. His most recent books are Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012) and Ambient Screens (2016).

“In the pitfalls of machinic capitalism, neo-​authoritarianism and multiple crises, radical art institutions still potentially play a role of resistance, even in creating multiple worlds and inventing micropolitical horizons. In Museums of the Commons: L’Internationale and the Crisis of Europe, Nikos Papastergiadis critically discusses these roles and the concrete constituents of a ‘confederation’ of museums throughout the 2010s. From its classical name ‘L’ Internationale’ to networked institutions of the common, and further to the post-​structuralist concept of transnational assemblages, we cannot stop accompanying the Greco-​Australian cultural theorist in his urge to find the traces and draw the lines of a new hetero-​cosmopolitism.” Gerald Raunig, Zürich University of the Arts, and the EIPCP (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies), Vienna “Globalization’s false promise to unite can be seen at its starkest in the European Union. What should have been a celebration of internationalism has been allowed to degenerate into an austerity union for Europeans which, naturally, infected our peoples with nativism and xenophobia. Thankfully, the struggle for transnationalism, along old-​fashioned internationalist lines, continues in both the realms of politics and culture. In the political sphere, radical internationalism is represented by movements like DiEM25 –​the Democracy in Europe Movement. In the sphere of art and culture, a confederation of museums and art institutions, poignantly known as L’Internationale, represents the most hopeful development. Nikos Papastergiadis’ new book incisively tells the story of this cosmopolitan endeavour, skilfully weaving together the political, institutional and cultural forces that underpin it.” Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics at the University of Athens, Secretary-General of MeRA25, and member of the Greek parliament

Museums of the Commons

L’Internationale and the Crisis of Europe

Nikos Papastergiadis

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Nikos Papastergiadis The right of Nikos Papastergiadis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​90135-​6  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​02283-​1  (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

For Okwui Enwezor 1963–​2019

Contents

Acknowledgements 

ix

1

Introduction: on trans-​institutional collaborations  The crisis of Europe  1 Invitation and writing  4 The Internationale again  10 Collaboration and crisis  11 From globalization to cosmopolitanism  14

1

2

To place in common that which we cannot do alone  19 From exhibitionary to infotainment complex  19 Genealogies to draw and depart from  20 Tensions in the twentieth-​century museum: the assault by the artists  25 After institutional critique  27 The other story  30 Where will L’Internationale head?  35 Place matters in a mobile world  38 Future trajectories  40

3

Conviviality as governance  What is a confederation?  51 On friendship  55 Working groups  58 Trans-​national assemblages  62

49

4

Heterocosmoi  Heterocosmoi as spaces of cultural production  70 Heterocosmoi and world-​making  73 Is there too much world?  78

68

5

The constituents  What is a constituent?  85 The MACBA moments in constituent power  88

82

viii Contents

Regional constituents  93 A bit more SALT  97 The other constituents  102 6

Art without museums  The religious icon: the supplicant  117 The autonomous image: “we bend the knee no more”  119 The ambient assemblage and post-​spectatorship  123 Double ontology of art  128 All along the street  133

115

7

Afterword: confederate or perish 

141

Bibliography  Index 

147 158

newgenprepdf

Acknowledgements

L’Internationale is a confederation of museums that are based in Europe. This book began with an invitation by the directors of L’Internationale to write about the first phase of their collaboration. The confederation was founded in 2010 and is ongoing. The attraction to undertake this book was not just in the access to the wealth of projects and members of L’Internationale, but also the opportunity to extend my commitment to cosmopolitanism. L’Internationale is an initiative that has the potential to implicate itself in the European ideals of integration and difference, as well as prompt wider alliances that dismantle the neoliberal agenda and enrich the commons. This book focuses on experiments in collaboration between 2010 and 2016. Of course, the complex prehistories in each museum and the abundance of current activities are outside the scope of this book. No doubt I have failed to capture all the vibrancy and agony in the making of museums of the commons. I am not sure that such a book has ever been written. However, it is equally doubtful that any future document that seeks to express the collective intelligence of the commons will be able to either focus on a single museum or confine itself to a fixed place. A friend of mine asked the great philosopher Agnes Heller what is the most important emotion. She replied: “It is obvious –​gratitude!” I am not sure that this answer is obvious in this world. However, I  consider myself lucky and grateful for the many conversations that have shaped this book. It would not have been possible to commence this project without the generosity and hospitality of the incredible staff at L’Internationale. In particular, I would like to thank Steven ten Thije, Maria Mallol, Charles Esche, Bart De Baere and Vasif Kortun for their ongoing support and critical feedback. Jasmin Pfefferkorn read early drafts and provided invaluable comments. Peter Beilharz, George E. Marcus and Paul Carter are inspiring friends. The School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne provided teaching relief during the first phase of fieldwork, and a visiting professorship in the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University as well as my time with Ute Meta Bauer and her team at the Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore have also provided stimulation and support. Heidi Lowther has been an impeccable editor at Routledge. However, my deepest thanks, once again, go to Scott McQuire and Victoria Lynn.

Figure 1.1 RABIH MROUÉ

Leap into the void, 2006. Light box 85 x 130 cm. Courtesy the artist & Sfeir-​Semler Gallery Beirut /​Hamburg.

Chapter 1

Introduction On trans-​institutional collaborations

The crisis of Europe It could not have been a worse time to begin a trans-​national collaboration between museums and art institutions from the opposite ends of Europe. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-​first century, the era of globalization was pinned between the negative polarities of personal insecurity and planetary degradation. The early promises of pulling the global masses out of poverty and opening up cultural exchange had been punctured by a resurgence of neo-​nationalism, economic precarity, and environmental disasters. Democratic principles and cultural values were increasingly subordinated to the ultra-​competitive policies of neoliberalism and militarized border politics. The European Union, for it all its promise to unite people against the re-​ emergence of fascism, was choking itself in a vice of institutional timidity and economic polarization. In one of the founding declarations of the European Union, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, announced: “Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity”.1 What was at first an organization for economic planning, and for a short period an instrument for advancing social democratic welfare and promoting state-​ building projects, became overtaken more recently by the demands of competitive neoliberalism. The French political economist Thomas Piketty goes so far as to claim that the foundations of the European project as a cooperative venture were collapsing (2017: 1). Not only the grand project in solidarity, but also the federal system that aimed to both secure the sovereignty of the member states and provide the primary mechanism for organizing the benefits and obligations for its citizens, was in ruin. Parallels can be witnessed in the cultural sector. Museums that were founded on the ideals of the Enlightenment and the principles of civic nationalism were also subjected to “institutional critique” that demanded more diverse forms of representation and transparency in funding. There were some “settlements” as the Eurocentric canon was expanded and the introduction of new experiments with public outreach programmes. However,

2 Introduction

there was little change to the governance models, and even worse, museums have been increasingly forced to justify their existence on the basis of their success in attracting corporate sponsorship and being a magnet for global tourism. The emphasis has shifted from the top-​down development of grand narratives to customer-​oriented facilitation of personal preferences. This period, in which both social democratic policies and universalist cultural paradigms were fractured, is best described with Antonio Gramsci’s famous term –​an interregnum –​the consensus that held together the fact that the old ideology has died, and the new is yet to be born. It was during this period that a small group of museum directors began a conversation on “rethinking our European heritage” (Badovinac et al. 2015: 38). This group grew to become the confederation of museums and art institutions that called themselves L’Internationale. L’Internationale was formally established in 2010 and led by an initiative from Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia). Although an earlier application to the European Union had failed, the proposition of forming a collaborative venture fell on fertile ground with their potential partners in other art institutions. Since the early 1950s there was already an abundance of artist networks that spanned Latin America and Eastern Europe (Kemp-​Welch & Friere 2012). These networks were facilitated by the use of mail art, visiting programmes, shared archives and even interventions into state-​defined cross-​cultural exchange programmes and biennales in South East Asia (Clark & Turner 2016).2 Museum directors like Bart De Baere and Charles Esche were aware of these complex trajectories and were quick to respond to Zdenka Badovinac’s proposal. They had already realized that even localized artistic perspectives needed to be framed within wider historical narratives and situated alongside specific political contexts. L’Internationale thus began with the aim to reconsider the “spirit of internationalism”,3 yet it also occurred at the same time as a new groundswell of movements such as the occupation of theatres in Greece, the declaration of “culture as a common good” in Italy, the mobilization of the Platform for the People affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, PAH) in Barcelona, the emergence of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), and the declaration of the European Charter of the Commons in London (Marsili & Milanese 2018). L’Internationale can therefore be seen as another vessel for thinking on trans-​national solidarity and realizing the commons. In its first phase, L’Internationale included the Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA, Barcelona, Spain), Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium), Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, the Netherlands), and the Július Koller Society (SJK), a collection site, archive, research centre, and place for public debate of Július Koller’s work in Bratislava and Vienna. Despite success in the next EU application, the involvement of SJK was short-​lived as they were forced to withdraw due to

Introduction 3

internal financial reasons. The withdrawal of SJK was a terrible disappointment to the group as their director Georg Schollhammer was instrumental in the founding group, a leading voice for trans-​institutional collaborations, and even before 2010, like many of the partners, he was already involved in various international artistic committees and networks.4 In 2013, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, Madrid, Spain) and SALT (Istanbul, Turkey) became members, and most recently, in 2018, the Muzeum Szutki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw Poland) also joined. L’Internationale, in its current configuration, is led by seven prominent museum directors, Zdenka Badovinac, De Baere, Ferran Barenblit, Manuel Borja-​ Villel, Charles Esche, Meriç Önur and Joanna Mytkowska.5 The wider network of L’Internationale includes a broad range of associate partners, such as Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA, Middlesbrough, UK), Valand Academy (Gothenburg, Sweden) and the National College of Art and Design (NCAD, Dublin, Ireland). It is perhaps not a coincidence that while France and Germany are hegemonic rivals in the European Union, there is no institution from either country in L’Internationale. Obviously anchored in Europe, L’Internationale also seeks to connect itself with different parts of the world, and each institution brings different “geopolitical” specializations that include West European collections, a Eurasian mission, a focus on Eastern Europe, as well as deep connections with Latin America, South East Asia, and the former Soviet sphere. In order to distinguish this collaboration from a temporary project or a tactical alliance, they refer to their structure for working together as a confederation. The confederation recognizes its internal differences and, while the partners vary in size, status, and approach, they all proclaim a shared commitment to collaboration, a democratic mode of partnership and respect for diversity. This expansive and idealistic confederation began with a relatively modest exhibition: The focus at first was a Pan-​European project on conceptual art, but, in the process, we discovered the need to rethink the function of the Museum and its connections to national heritage. National histories were often discordant with the artworks that were held in national collections, there was scepticism towards the way national heritage was co-​opted by the art market, and also a growing awareness that the mega-​institutions like MOMA were developing strategies to extract regional knowledge so that their claims to globality or universal knowledge could be justified. This new multinational culture grab was in contradiction to our thinking of the emergence of a pluriversal world and the need to build a commons.6 Against this global trend to standardize cultural formats, L’Internationale was established as a decentralized project that pools its collective resources to generate common knowledge in the form of exhibitions, publications,

4 Introduction

seminars, and exchanges of artworks and archives from their collections. From the outset, the team declared:  “We want to offer an alternative to ‘bigger is better’ ” (Badovinac et al. 2015: 38). Their ambition was to move from a binary international scene comprising diverse national representatives, to a pluralistic cosmopolitan site of friendly struggle (Piotowski 2015: 343). To develop a third space that is not captured by the corporatist vision of the global and the neo-​nationalist claims on the local, Charles Esches, director of the Van Abbemuseum, has also claimed that L’Internationale needed to forge an expansive vision that joins local aspiration to worldly consciousness, highlight the role of art in critiquing the bureaucratization of everyday life, and explore non-​exclusive modes of preserving, displaying and using cultural heritage.7

Invitation and writing Midway through 2016 I  received an invitation to help the directors of L’Internationale produce a book on their collaborative venture. During the period in which I researched and wrote the book, L’Internationale comprised six museums and art institutions: Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia), the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA, Barcelona, Spain), the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium), the Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, the Netherlands), the Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia (MNCARS, Madrid, Spain), and SALT (Istanbul, Turkey). My engagement was focussed through their respective directors. With the invitation came an impossible deadline and a warning that the museum directors were “a motley crew”, who revelled in the robust negotiation of contradictory possibilities. And, true to form, they demonstrated exactly these expansive and contrarian characteristics, or what Bart De Baere, director of M HKA in Antwerp, called a conjunction of “ruthless pragmatism and committed idealism”.8 I recalled the legendary Billy Wilder’s confession that a director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard! Fortunately, neither an analysis of their individual motivations nor an evaluation of the historical impact of their institutions was the focus of this invitation. My aim was to provide an account of the collective intelligence that occurs across the institutions, and in the coming together of different agents. This book is as much a reflection on the conditions of trans-​institutional collaboration as it is a comment on the future of museums in the context of neoliberalism. The realization of the book’s structure and genre was also a process of elimination. It was clear that a conventional art historical survey would not suffice, and the profiling of case studies was already well advanced by the wide range of outputs by the curators and critics that were already involved with L’Internationale (Aikens et al. 2016; Aikens et al. 2018; Badovinac et al. 2018; Byrne et al. 2018). More importantly, I was not

Introduction 5

expected to produce a consultancy report nor summoned to write a text of advocacy. I was given the privilege of an inside view, but I did not see this as an opportunity to become an insider. I was neither a hired pen nor a token theorist. All such roles would be redundant, because all of the six directors were accomplished authors, capable administrators, champions of their own causes and more than a little literate in critical theory. In the words of Zdenka Badovinac, the director of the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana: “we all write and curate”.9 Similarly, De Baere articulated the philosophical reach of their collective curatorial vision when he described it as “thinking in action”.10 All the directors are careful readers of philosophy and literature but also professionally deeply rooted within the institutions of art. They began as independent curators and quickly rose up the ranks of the art institutions. None have come into their directorship via academia or a career in business and civic management. Many, such as Charles Esche, are active in teaching in art schools in the United Kingdom and across Europe. Zdenka Badovinac studied art history and philosophy at university, and a year after graduation she was working for the Moderna galerija. In 1993, she was appointed director, and remains in that role despite having to contend for her position at elections every five years. Before returning to Istanbul to establish the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre in 2001, Vasif Kortun was the founding director of the Museum of the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York. Kortun describes himself as part of a generation that “came to maturity through biennales” (Kortun 2011). Bart De Baere is unique among the directors in that he was previously active in cultural policy. Between 1999 and 2001 he served as adviser on cultural heritage and contemporary art to the Flemish minister of culture, managing the integration of the first cultural heritage legislation for Belgium. However, like Kortun, De Baere also sees himself as part of the generation that was defined by the systemic shifts in the geopolitical landscape that occurred in 1989. “It was a moment of becoming of the notion of a curator”, he recalls, and also an optimistic period in which many of them believed that the “societal set up could be improved, that is also why we took charge of museum”.11 While the directors have often expressed trenchant critiques of the mainstream, they have never sought to destroy the museum. They neither embrace the market nor retreat into an idealized form of oppositionalism. On the contrary, their aims are both to demand a more consistent realization of the cultural ideals at the heart of the European Union and to open up the institutions of art. The directors of L’Internationale are more than colleagues and partners. They appear to enjoy a deep friendship that comes from a shared intellectual history and cultural vision. According to Zdenka Badovinac, “Most of us have known each over for over ten years. Doing collaborative projects and guest curating in each other’s institutions. CIMAM was also an important base”.12 Manuel Borja-​ Villel, director of Reina Sofia, added that their strength is not an external asset, like a matter of status before a “a court of

6 Introduction

superior standing, but that it is rather submerged within the framework of our personal relationships”.13 The experience of trust and sociality is not confined to a subjective feeling but is also woven into their modalities of governance and forged through a common critical outlook. Badovinac adds that VOTI, an online platform,14 was also an experience that “most of us shared with a significant group of curators of our generation”.15 In their initial encounters through the 1990s and early 2000s, the directors drew on and participated in a range of influential debates about the need to address the world from inside the cultural–​institutional sphere. The most prominent challenge that they faced was the condition that the Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant called “mondialites”  –​worldliness as a collective force; the “promiscuous” poetics of radical self-​organization and resistance to economic globalization. In talking to people closely involved in L’Internationale, some more specific signs of commonality emerge, or even a kind of koine that is typical of a generation formed by the critical discourse of the 1980s (Borja-​Villel 2018a: 55). For instance, there is a consistent cross-​referencing of notable philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek; and artists and collectives such as Hüseyin Alptekin, Marcel Broodthaers, Jimmie Durham, IRWIN and NSK, Hans Haacke, Hito Steyerl, and Mladen Stilinovic.16 It is also evident that L’Internationale draws heavily from the art historical legacy of institutional critique, new museology and “experimental institutionalism”. The confederation is often described as a platform for questioning the dominant narratives of artistic development and an opportunity to reset the function of the museum. No museum can tell the whole story of art. It is too big and too messy. Curators inevitably make selections in order to develop coherent narratives. However, this process is never neutral as the narratives also provide a kind of orienting device, not only for grasping history but also for establishing a place in the world. The use of the museum as an orientation device, with its Eurocentric biases and hierarchies that privileged white men, has been subjected to much critique. As a consequence, in the joint activities of L’Internationale, there is little showcasing of the genius of individual artists, or profiling of canonical art movements, but rather, a pattern of developing common themes and addressing social issues from localized perspectives. Despite their conscious investment in establishing the critical and discursive apparatus for L’Internationale, the one glaring blind spot in the director’s cultural production is the critical reflection on their own history of trans-​ institutional collaboration. There have been numerous opportunities where the stories from L’Internationale could have been interwoven into their critique of the institutions of art (Kortun 2018a); account of the international networks (Badovinac 2019); analysis of the amnesia in art histories (De Baere et al. 2017; Esche 2017); and commentary on the museum of the commons (Borja-​Villel 2017a). Yet in each instance, the director’s critical focus has

Introduction 7

remained largely tethered to their own institutions, or developed in response to other external agencies and international organizations. A  transversal approach is central to the projects conducted within its framework, but the articulation of this perspective on L’Internationale has been missing. It is this gap that this book sets out to fill. Clearly, I  was both daunted and inspired by the complexity of L’Internationale. My research began as an extensive tour of each of the institutions. I conducted interviews with all the directors, key staff and their respective external partners that they call “constituents”. This was an intense period of familiarization and interrogation. At the end of each visit, and as a record of my “field trip”, I presented a document to each institution. These documents, which were comprised of a series of quotations, profiles, reflections, and commentaries, were invaluable starting points that helped me define the five key domains of research for this book: the genealogy of the museum; the need for alternative models of trans-​ institutional governance; examples of innovation in the spaces of aesthetic production; experimentation in the forms of partnership and engagement with constituents; and finally, an examination of the impact of collaborative practices on contemporary visual culture. After this initial phase of fieldwork in late 2016 there was a period of follow-​up interviews and discussions that were conducted via Skype. During these group meetings it became even more evident to me that the directors are friends that revel in dissensus. At times they even seek to outperform each other as devil’s advocate. In the words of Bart De Baere, we “love to do beautiful things in a precise way […] we are not vague idealists”.17 While there is not a hair’s breadth of difference between the directors in terms of ideological orientation and their respective museological knowledge is mutually compatible, there were significant variations in their willingness and capacity to provide feedback. Some were overwhelmed by their other duties and consented to the delegation of the role of respondent to the other directors. I learned most about the multiple genealogies of the museum, the shifts towards developing relations with constituents, and the role of culture in the neoliberal context through my correspondences with Bart De Baere, Charles Esche, and Vasif Kortum. As the book unfolded I saw my role in more general terms, to provide a transversal account that connects the ideas across the various institutions and to situate this in the wider visual and social context. What I hope has emerged from these encounters is a mode of address that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once characterized as “critical intimacy” (Spivak & Papastergiadis 1991). The resultant text is provisional and incomplete. It has not progressed through deep fieldwork or archival research. My take on L’Internationale resembles what George Marcus has defined as “second-​order observation” (2016). It has benefited from both the local knowledge of key practitioners and the opportunity to be witness to an evolving collective thinking. Artists, curators, and mediators, like academics, are all experts in research. I regard

8 Introduction

these practitioners as epistemic partners. They may differ in their respective approaches and deliver divergent outcomes, but they often traverse a common field and develop distinctive and complimentary insights. Too often these experts do not share their knowledge. While there is growing recognition of “practice-​based research” within the university context, and a “discursive turn” in art institutions, there are still profound gaps and barriers to exchange. My own research experience was also rather bumpy. For instance, I could encourage the directors, curators and constituents, but the combination of the rapid fire of email responses and the longish delays in feedback had the effect of both fast-​tracking speculative conjectures and stretching open a boring plain of waiting for verification. Some of the directors revelled in the feedback, while others held back to the end. This variation in responses and the consequence of some of the directors being out of the picture during the development of key chapters was both a stimulus for creative engagement and a source of tension. In an ideal world, I suspect that any defensive and territorial dispositions would have been more easily overcome if the preliminary round of interviews had been followed up by intensive writing workshops. It would have been far more productive to meet face to face after the drafts had been developed. In that way, the words and actions of the protagonists may have yielded more sustained narrative forms and engaged me in vivid bouts of collaborative writing. While there were limits to my collaborative opportunities, this process of research opened up a view that scholars rarely glimpse. It also underlined the productive interplay between speculation and feedback. The delay in response from the directors opened up vistas in the imagination, and their feedback helped place my conjectures in a field. However, it is also important to stress that L’Internationale is not fixed entity, and this book makes no pretension to offering a definitive overview. It is impossible to write a book that is in accord with the perspectives and captures the diverse histories of all the partners. Manuel Borja-​Villel often described L’Internationale as a formless monster. In his view it needs to be a multisited institution with an acephalous programme. He goes on to claim that this is also a necessity at the micro level. He recalled an event at the Reina Sofia (RS) in which we had a formal, official visit in one building, and an event dealing with activism queer in another. Snipers on the rooftop, and stilettos on the backstage. The two events occurred in a kind of parallel universe –​each with their own communities and probably blissfully unaware of each other. Given that the RS has a complex administrative structure, it is possible to exploit this heterogeneity to create spaces of exception. […] Unless an institution has the potential to create these anomalous sites, then it is intolerable. If everything is subjected to the surveillance of the neoliberal logic and nothing can escape from it, then it will crush its very reason for existence.18

Introduction 9

As a physical entity L’Internationale is almost invisible. There are no headquarters and the respective members are not satellite stations. However, it is highly visible in the footprints left by multiple projects, ranging from exhibitions to publications to symposia to online documents. From the outset I  raised a number of questions that I  hoped would identify the extent to which such a collaborative venture could make a difference: whether this confederation enabled different things to come together, and if different things did come together, then what went to the surface? I  was also interested in discovering whether the coming together of things on the surface would demand new frames that could make it more comprehensible, coherent, and identifiable. Furthermore, it was necessary to consider whether the emergent frames were joined up and overlaid with each other to the extent that they produced a grid. In short, I  used this diagram of Surface-​Frame-​Grid to examine whether something new is produced by L’Internationale, and then to explore how this change created the possibility for art to leave its “own territory” (Wright 2013: 29). By examining the nexus between Surface-​Frame-​ Grid it is possible to track elements that are latent but not yet comprehensible, and whose coming together concentrates further action and opens up new connections. The frame allows the process of collaboration to take a more visible and comprehensible shape. When frames start to multiply and interlink with each other, a grid is manifest. The grid provides both a holding function that supports the instituting of knowledge, and the basis for organizing communication. It is not a uniform and closed structure, as it is always vibrating with the elements that come to the surface. This diagram guided my research into the collaborations in the confederation. Verification required a back-​and-​forth process of cross-​checking with the members. As a writer based in Australia, I had limited opportunity to test public responses in Europe. My focus was more directed towards the way the members of L’Internationale addressed local issues in order to also articulate the structures and processes of an emergent commons. This aim cuts deeper and further than the forms of institutional critique in the art world. For as Charles Esche pointed out, “institutional critique is not enough, critique, yeah that’s great, all it does though is make us more clear about how miserable we are”.19 To go beyond clarifying our collective sadness, we need to see what kind of action can arise. It needs to go from critique of the existing institutional formations to the collaborative production of the commons. A vital advance that L’Internationale has proposed is based on the proposition that their respective publics are hailed as constituents; their institutional apparatus is defined as a place of constituency; and the enactment of constituting means that the institutions have to be sites of social transformation. The institutions of L’Internationale are therefore not just places for the representation of critique, and places to keep people in their place, but unbounded sites where people are already exposed to the world and the infinite experience of being-​in-​common (Nancy 1991: 31).

10 Introduction

The Internationale again L’Internationale, as a title for a confederation, strikes a heroic note. It takes its name from the workers’ anthem “L’Internationale”. In 1864, the First International (International Workingmen’s Association) was formed in London to defend the working class and promote the establishment of a socialist society. The members of workers’ unions, anarchists, and intellectuals from the left often spoke of a shared sense of citizenship and an ongoing concern with issues that span the personal and the planetary. It held an annual congress in different European cities until 1872 in The Hague where the Marxists expelled the anarchist groups led by Mikhail Bakunin. Famously, the division between the republican, anarchist, and socialist internationalism perspectives led to the split and eventual dissolution of the movement. Nevertheless the song still resonates as an anthem of unity and solidarity: Le monde va changer de base, Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout. C’est la lutte finale; Groupons nous et demain L’Internationale Sera le genre humain. The museum confederation lays claim to be part of this socialist tradition, though one that, in its more current manifestation, appears less certain about the precise identity of the emancipatory agents and the role of the state. Karl Marx was always sceptical of the limits of a republican base for socialism, and dismissive of the self-​determinism of the anarchists. He insisted on class unity across borders. The basis and boundaries of revolutionary change remain an unresolved question among the left. The idea of a confederation as a governance model for the museums in L’Internationale is a partial attempt to address the vexed relationship between agency and solidarity. While the internal hierarchies and attachments to local civic regulations have not been dissolved by the respective museums, there have been important steps towards extending the frontiers of dialogue, learning, and exchange. At present, the politics of solidarity in L’Internationale is articulated through an ethical position based on the values of difference, and a social commitment to the commons –​adopting a social system of stewardship that is a counterpoint to the free-​market values on surplus wealth. It also stresses that creativity is not just an individualistic expression but is generated by the pooling of collective social intelligence. The ideas of the commons are neither moral abstractions nor empty political gestures. Museum directors and curators cannot stand outside the communities that they are supposed to be part of and care for. The commons must be part of the fabric of museum organization and intelligence. Hence, the confederation has already

Introduction 11

established a basis for sharing the art works in their respective collections, as well as drawing on the knowledge formed by their extended members. While there are legal restrictions and local regulative policies that limit the extent to which resources can be held in common, there is a commitment to being open to each other and extending the process of exchange to the wider society. From my own perspective as an author, providing an outline for the museums of the commons may well be an impossible and unending quest, but it is not a zero-​sum game. While we should not live on the promise of jam tomorrow, there is also no point in expecting to get it all at once. I do not take a purist definition of the commons. The big picture portrayal of European crisis is depressing. By contrast, inspiration can be found from micro-​histories such as the role of SALT –​“offering an agonistic sphere where difficult questions could be posed” in the build-​up to the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul (Kortun 2018a).

Collaboration and crisis In the 1990s, the Swedish curator Maria Lind was an advocate for collaboration in contemporary artistic practices. A decade later she also proposed that it was also necessary to rethink the “systematization” of museums and contemporary art institutions (Lind 2017). Although the term “collaboration” is often confined to its instrumental meaning of incorporating diverse partners with complementary skills, Lind stressed that the concept of collaboration should expand to debunk the mysterious hierarchies of artistic genius, and highlight the creative interplay that occurs in the mess of cultural production. However, in the art world there is still a relatively small view on collaboration. It is most often used to justify the value of community art and compensate for the gaps in curatorial authority. It is seldom used to question the capacity of the museum to be a holder of global culture, let alone be a sanctuary from the ravages of globalization. In this book I will argue that if L’Internationale is to distinguish itself, it must move on five interrelated fronts: generate new knowledge about the historical place of the museum; adopt convivial modes of governance; rethink the spaces of aesthetic production; address the role of the publics as constituents; and mobilize a critical engagement with ambient assemblages. In broader terms, I  also believe that L’Internationale is a response to a profound social crisis. Increasingly, we are witness to the fragmentation of state institutions, the transfer of public assets to private interests, and the outsourcing of civic roles. This has not only led to the disarticulation of the state from the nation, but also to the loss of faith in the nation as the basis for security and progressive civic engagement. The alternative of globalized competition that produces an endless race to the bottom is even less palatable. There is no option to pull out of both these bad options and withdraw into an older republican vision of splendid isolation. The wider objective of

12 Introduction

this book is to contribute to a renewed effort to rethink trans-​national solidarity. This will entail imagining the communities in the art world as part of a wider project to engage the civic beyond the gears of ethnic identity and the territorial boundaries of the nation state. It will demand that we grasp the imbrication of politics and art as both a means to put pressure on existing institutions and the instituting of new modes of becoming. This is an interregnum. We are somewhere between deglobalization and re-​transnationalization. At the heart of L’Internationale is the attempt to put into practice the European Union’s cultural ideals of equality and solidarity, rather than follow the trends that are being led by a chauvinist neo-​nationalism and a self-​ cannibalizing neoliberalism. A working group of curators in L’Internationale traced these tensions back to the 1980s and developed a five-​year exhibition and research programme called The Uses of Art. It culminated in the publication of the book The Long 1980s (Aiken et al. 2018: 9). The significance of such a project and the impulse behind the formation of L’Internationale, in my eyes, is not confined to Europe. By tracking the emergence of L’Internationale we also get a chance to step back and reroute the links between globalization and cosmopolitanism. In 1989, the World Wide Web came into existence and, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen protests, real existing communism disintegrated. In the 1990s, there was war in the Balkans, ethnic nationalism was resurgent, and multiculturalism was increasingly institutionalized. Privatization, corruption, and the wild capitalism that fed the new globalization spawned gaping inequalities in Central and Eastern Europe (Milanovic 1998). With the socialist threat to capitalism discredited, liberal governments ushered in a new era of neoliberal economics. In Western Europe, the previous role of the state as a selective guarantor of welfare, cultural access, and relative social equality was slowly dismantled. Deregulation of the market and the outsourcing of services under the mantra of “New Public Management” were justified in terms of financial efficiency but resulted in a massive transfer of power from public ownership to private interests. In the face of complaints, the opening up of all human activities to competition became the universal panacea. Society was sold the line that “there is no alternative” and told that all progressive ideologies “necessarily lead[ing] to a new Gulag” (Zizek 2001). Even before 11 September 2001, the idea of being in a state of “crisis” or “exception” had become normalized. Afterwards, the threat of crisis became ambient. Ambience is a term that I deploy for rethinking the contemporary nexus between the wider aesthetics of spectatorship and the politics of participation that resulted from the digital revolution. Ambience refers to a communicative environment in which perceptual experience and human subjectivity are entangled with multiple stimuli from both strong channels and weak signals of information. The explosion of mobile communication devices has also produced a proliferation in the inventory of aesthetic environments.

Introduction 13

From mediated body prosthetics, to the incorporation of domestic interiors as incubators for trans-​national artistic experiments, to the seepage from the museum’s thresholds to the surrounding streets, to the telematic linking of large screens in urban spaces, to the routinization of art fairs, festivals, and biennales, art is now worn, carried, encountered, and transmitted on a scale and in ways that were previously unimaginable. Sensory experience is distributed more widely through the body, and the border between the artwork and its environment becomes tremulous. However, there is not just a multiplication of media, but there is also an acceleration in delivery and plasticity in feedback, and a phasing in and out of the background and foreground sources. Thus, I will use the concept of ambience to refer to the interplay of media that are now dispersed across the cultural landscape and the transformations in the modes of sensory experience and cognition in public spaces. In my view, the impact of perceptual and communicative transformation in art and everyday life has not been fully registered in the projects that have thus far emerged from L’Internationale. The opportunities and risks of this mediated environment are not confined to either an expansive mode of consumerism or a compliant condition of cultural spectatorship. The functionality of these new communicative environments is also a platform for understanding the formation of intimacy at a distance and a resource for extending the boundaries of the cultural commons. The structure of this book is based on the five themes that I  believe are necessary to build the museums of the commons. In the following chapter I will examine the critical history of the museum. The point is not to excavate the real origins or map out the progressive orientation of the museums, but rather to set up a new nexus between the grounds and flows that facilitate a cultural knowledge for our time. Chapter 3 explores the modes and models that will sustain a trans-​institutional collaboration. I argue that conviviality is not a benign consequence of well-​meaning organizations but the necessary precondition of governance. It would be a grave failure if L’Internationale fell into the trap of producing blockbuster exhibitions that could tour in the museums of their confederation. Hence, the focus of Chapter 4 is a reflection on the production of common projects. It not only traces the way shared ideas take form in distinctive ways in each location, but also the emergence of heterocosmoi, the manifestation of specific world-​making concepts. A key innovation by the members of L’Internationale is articulation of the public not as consumers but as constituents. In Chapter  5, I  track the role of the constituents in the development of curatorial strategies and the organization of narratives in the different museums. The challenge of understanding the interplay between aesthetics and politics in the era of digital communication is the subject of Chapter  6. In this chapter I  not only map out the shift in the forms of spectatorship but also set out how the concept of ambience can address both the democratic impulse in dialogic art and also the aesthetic experience of collective practices.

14 Introduction

From globalization to cosmopolitanism Finally, the invitation to reflect on the trans-​ national collaborations in L’Internationale was also an opportunity to extend my own long-​ term engagement with the possibilities of cosmopolitanism in a globalizing world. In the case of museums and art institutions, the cosmopolitan challenge is not confined to either promoting a new homogeneous civic identity, or elevating the city as a repository for the world’s culture. L’Internationale has the potential to serve as a grid for a wider trans-​national dialogue on cosmopolitanism. The fact that the initiative for L’Internationale came from one of the smallest partners is also not an accident. Zdenka Badovinac acknowledged that Tito’s leadership in the creation of the Yugoslavian model of self-​managed socialism, and his role in the Non-​Aligned Movement, gave Yugoslav people more sovereignty in international exchanges. Yugoslavia was an important international agent in times of socialism, which is not the case of any its successors. On the other side, Yugoslavia had very strong civil society. Especially in her formative 1980s in Slovenia, the subculture had a very intensive role in democratic processes. The subculture scene and different new social movements like the feminist, homosexual, environmental, peace, human rights movements created a strong sense of alternative community.20 It is a peculiar transposition of the geopolitical landscape, that the principles of solidarity, collaboration, decentralization, and democratic governance, which are now central to L’Internationale, have many of their roots in Yugoslavian models of alternative cultural production and alliances. In the post-​socialist context of diverse publics and networked public spaces, the traffic in culture may have intensified and this has sharpened the appreciation that no one can survive in relative isolation. No institution can last for long if it either installs rigid barriers on exchange or lacks any mechanism for filtering the plenitude of noise. Once again, we seem stuck before bad options. In the neoliberal-​hypercommunicative city, the choices for a museum are often reduced to either hanging on as a relic from the quaint past or emerging as a service provider in the marketplace of spectacles. However, rather than either resigning myself to the pragmatic resignation that civic identification is not as bad as neocolonial corporatism, or indulging in the simplistic opposition between bad nationalism and good cosmopolitanism, I look towards the example of L’Internationale as an opportunity to re-​examine the basis of a cosmopolitical venture. This will involve a closer exploration of the way people mediate between different systems, and the existence of institutions that realize collective cultural practices. Otherwise, we are entangled in a dance of dependency and disavowal –​cosmopolitan agents are dependent on national institutions but disavow their dependency on its

Introduction 15

resources. Meanwhile, the national imaginary is dependent on cosmopolitan values but disavows any binding force to anything that compromises its sovereign independence. How can we break out of these stultifying oppositions? The globe in globalization is not the same as the cosmos in cosmopolitanism. A  cursory glance of the current landscape reveals the extent to which globalization developed integrative logistics that facilitate transparency, standardize classification services, and develop generic communication systems. In short, to enable mobility and exchange, globalization requires a hermetic, flat, standardized world. This machine for flattening the world has nothing to do with cosmopolitanism. Most museum directors would recognize that the challenges of human migration, economic precarity, and climate change are global in scale and are not bound by national borders. No museum can survive as an island. However, I also think we need an alternative framework for understanding the world. In my view, to be cosmopolitan is to be open to the world in all its differences. When I previously cited Jean-​Luc Nancy’s phrase “being-​in-​common”, I prefaced this by giving special emphasis to the idea that people are “already exposed”. This emphasis was intended to highlight that cosmopolitanism is a primary experience of the world. It is not just a moral precept or a secondary form of learned conduct. The sense of being-​in-​common is central to all forms of consciousness and social action. This means that we do not display a cosmopolitan sensibility by drawing out our hidden essence or by abiding by social codes. On the contrary, it transpires through our relations with the world. Hence, the wonderful paradox that is at the heart of cosmopolitanism, which I believe also cuts across L’Internationale, –​the creation of radical equality among all people –​includes the acceptance that the encounter with different people can only be meaningful if both our similarities and our differences are articulated. Globalization may aim to homogenize the world, but the tendency of cosmopolitanism is towards a vivid world of generative differentiation.

Notes 1 https://​ e uropa.eu/​ e uropean-​ u nion/​ about-​ e u/​ s ymbols/​ e urope-​ d ay/​ s chuman-​ declaration_​en (accessed 1 June 2019). The European Economic Community was founded in 1957 as a technocratic instrument for organizing economic planning in six adjacent countries. It commenced in an era of state-​managed capitalism and amidst the insecurities of the Cold War. It has grown to include 28 member states. While social democratic welfare principles are still prominent in the rhetoric of its mission statements, it is now increasingly shaped according to the model of neoliberalism. France and Germany were the dominant partners and remain as rivals for hegemonic influence. 2 I am indebted to Anca Rujiou’s research on artist networks. On mail art:  https://​ mailartists.wordpress.com/​2007/​11/​03/​jaroslaw-​kozlowski/​kozlowski-​1/​; Klara Kemp-Welch and Christina Freire, “Artists’ Networks in Latin America and Eastern Europe”, https://​core.ac.uk/​download/​pdf/​78275533.pdf; Mail Art Chro-​No-​Logy,

16 Introduction an archive in progress started by Artpool, Budapest www.artpool.hu/​MailArt/​ chrono/​1962.html; Aktuelle Kunst in Osteuropa https://​monoskop.org/​images/​d/​dd/​ Groh_​Klaus_​Aktuelle_​Kunst_​in_​Osteuropa.pdf. On publications and exchanges, see: “Something Unnameable in Common”, Translocal Collaboration at the Beau Geste Press, Zanna Gilbert www.academia.edu/​2927567/​_​Something_​Unnameable_​ in_​Common_​Translocal_​Collaboration_​at_​the_​Beau_​Geste_​Press; Black Market International, 1985, Poznan, A  network of performance artists from Poland, Germany to Singapore (Lee Wen), http://​blackmarketinternational.blogspot.com/​ . 3 Email correspondence with Zdenka Badovinac, 22 May 2019. On the early history of “new internationalism” in the visual arts, see Fisher (1994), Papastergiadis (1993, 1994). 4 Prominent examples of trans-​national cultural networks include:  the Comité van Roosendaal, an alliance of Western European art institutions; Cluster, a network of small-​scale institutions that are located in the peri-​urban area of European cities, and Holon in the Middle East; Arts Collaboratory, which provides a platform of exchange for arts organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; coalitions of artists, activists, and scholars have formed working groups such as Decolonial Aesthetics and Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern Conceptualisms Network); and new artist unions such as Gulf Labor have been formed to tackle the abuse of rights in the construction of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, or W.A.G.E, which fights for the economic rights of artists in the United States. In Australia, there is CAOS, a network of contemporary art organizations that aims to offer knowledge sharing and peer support. See also Petresin-​Bachelez (2015). 5 In 2016, Ferran Barenblit replaced Bartomeu Mari as director of MACBA, and Meriç Önur took over as director of SALT from Vasıf Kortun ın April 2017. At the same time as the formation of L’Internationale, members of the Van Abbemuseum and M KHA were also part of the short-​lived Comité van Roosendaal, an alliance of Western European art institutions. See www.e-​flux.com/​announcements/​37068/​ institutional-​attitudes/​ (accessed 2 February 2016). 6 Steven ten Thije, Eindhoven interview, 15 September 2016. 7 Email correspondence with Charles Esche, 5 February 2017. 8 Bart De Baere, interview, Antwerp, 12 September 2016 9 Zdenka Badovinac, interview, Ljubljana, 28 August 2016. 10 Bart De Baere, interview, Antwerp, 12 September 2016. Thinking in action, and active thinking is not just De Baere’s personal motif, but also the basis for differentiating the museum from either a place of “pure technical execution” or an exempted zone for “pure lofty thinking”: M HKA thinks, collects, presents, receives. It’s as simple as that. Four verbs are sufficient to depict ‘the image’ of M HKA. In all their simplicity these notions cover, however, a layered meaning. In the reality of M HKA they hook up continuously and even don’t exist apart from one another. M HKA doesn’t want to work any longer starting from different departments and identities, but has the ambition to bring in its functioning everything together in action/​active thinking that finds its origin in contemporary art and visual culture and is contained in the societal project M HKA wants to realize.

Introduction 17 (In the Policy plan M HKA 2006–​2010 for the cultural heritage subventions, quoted in email correspondence with Bart De Bare, 28 August 2019) 1 1 Email correspondence with Bart De Baere, 20 May 2019. 12 Zdenka Badovinac, interview, Ljublana, 28 August 2016. CIMAM is the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art. The former director of MACBA Bartomeu Mari, and current members of L’Internationale Zdenka Badonivac and Manolo Borjes-​ Villel have been past presidents of CIMAM, and Bart De Baere is currently on the board. In November 2015, both Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche resigned as board members of CIMAM as a result of the controversy around freedom of expression at MACBA. While this organization has been an important networking and lobbying organization, it has none of the features of co-​production and sharing that are central to the formation of L’Internationale. 13 Manuel Borja-​Villel, interview, Madrid, 1 September 2016. 14 Between 1998 and 2000, most of the directors were active in a seminal online forum known as VOTI that reflected and embraced a new spirit of internationalism. Artists and curators were invited to VOTI from every continent. According to Vasif Kortun, this forum quickly saw the potential of the internet to not only “facilitate rapid communication across distance, but also to democratize information”. Jordan Crandall, the artist and editor of the publication on the history of VOTI, described the features and qualities of the VOTI online forum as a “strange conglomeration of urban actors”, as an “assemblage of people, technologies, places, rhythms, thoughts and sensations”, “openness of communication”, “volatile spaces that were never unified”, “dispersed constituencies […] that did not fully align with conventional boundaries”. He also noted that the effect of this exchange was twofold. On the one hand, it relied on the fluidity of digital communication and a “condition of impermanence”, and on the other, it also enabled “new corporealities and localisms”. Crandall defined himself as part “air traffic controller” and part “dinner host” (VOTI 14). See VOTI Union of the Imaginary; A Curator’s Online Forum http://​saltonline.org/​en/​634 (accessed 4 November 2017). 15 Zdenka Badonivac, interview, Ljubljana, 28 August 2016. 16 The list of common theorists is quite extensive. It would also include Gerald Raunig, Brian Holmes, Walter Mignolo, Boris Groys, and, of course, in every local context there are specific influences, such as, in Ljubljana the local theorists have been also very important and are having a growing influence in the L’Internationale publications, Mladen Dolar, Renata Salecl, Tomaž Mastnak, Rastko Močnik, or in Antwerp Pascal Gielen. 17 Bart De Baere, interview, Antwerp, 12 September 2016. 18 Borja-​Villel, interview, Madrid, 1 September 2016. 19 Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. 20 Email correspondence with Zdenka Badovinac, 23 September 2019.

Figure 2.1 Tania Bruguera, Museo de Arte Util, 2013, curators Annie Fletcher, Nick Aikens, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Chapter 2

To place in common that which we cannot do alone

From exhibitionary to infotainment complex With a facade that resembled a Greek temple, the sweeping steps leading up to a museum announced the beginning of an exercise in raising yourself up from the street and entering into a higher state. The museum began as a place of contemplation and curiosity, but it was also a vault and vitrine for the collection, classification, and display of objects that embodied both power and knowledge. In the nineteenth century the ideal of its design was closer to the cathedral, the interior resembled a theatre, and the atmosphere had the hushed tone of a university. In this century, it functions as a memory machine, information beacon, and cultural lab, as well as being aligned with other places of cultural consumption, such as malls, stadia, and multiscreen street corners. The museum once saw itself as being above the street. Now it opens its thresholds to commune with the passing traffic and draws on the energy of urban life. The function of the contemporary museum has thus expanded from being an archive of precious objects that were arranged as a wondrous microcosm of cultural evolution, and a glorious showcase for mercantile and colonial expansion, to a civic platform for enlightening citizens, and a node in the leisure and entertainment sector. Its ambitions have ranged from generating national consciousness, educating the people, producing universal narratives of the development of human civilization, and holding visual archives that support art historical inquiry to displaying the influence of specific artistic styles, entertaining tourists, fostering social inclusion, and providing a venue for soft diplomacy. In the twentieth century, the contradictory aims of the museum were brought more to the fore as it gradually learnt to speak to and for more people from diverse backgrounds. Inevitably, therefore, ethical and political questions assumed greater urgency as the institution’s colonial underpinnings and exclusionary practices were exposed; equally disciplinary boundaries were blurred, and the relationship between art and everyday life was made more explicit. Many predicted that either the critique of the patriarchal and colonial foundations, or the advance of digital culture

20  To place in common

would spell the ruin of the museum. Yet, museums have made some minor adjustments and are now rebounding with even greater vigour. More recently, the emphasis has shifted decisively towards being a cultural lighthouse for attracting global tourists and their money, as well as a rival to the resurgence in private museums. Just as the purpose of the museum has changed over the years, the ways in which museums present or frame their beautiful objects and engage or educate visitors has shifted. The balance between entertainment and information is in flux. In this chapter I will examine both the wider historical context that gave birth to the museum, and the specific headings that are facing L’Internationale, namely, the development of a decolonial approach towards redefining cultural history, the tensions arising from the social condition of precarity, and the affordances for the ambient transmission of information. In this outline of the competing narratives that shape the museum today, my aim is not to discover the roots of the confederation but to commit the project of historical exploration, as Michel Foucault would say, “to its dissipation” (1984a: 95). Hence, the questions do not point back to a singular origin in order to discover the model of truth, but to use the multiple lines of critique and contestation in the history of museums to invent other possibilities. Therefore, I commence by asking: What are the lineages of the museum that it has drawn from, and how does this narrative produce new lines of departure? Who pioneered alternative models, and what are the changes that are defining future possibilities? In broad terms, it is useful to both map the pitfalls in the transition of the museum’s operation from the “exhibitionary” to the “infotainment” complex, and provide an outline of viable alternatives.

Genealogies to draw and depart from Among the stories on the multiple origins of the museums it can be asserted that there is a strong case for proposing the Ennigaldi-​Nanna as the site for the first museum. This was a section of a palace in which artefacts where arranged in chronological order and labelled. It dates back to 530 bce and was located in the state of Ur, modern-​day Iraq. The first use of the word “museum” can be traced back to the Hellenistic period when the term mouseion was used to refer to places of learning that gathered under the protection of Mousa –​ the goddess daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and patron of the arts and science. Most famously in Alexandria, it was the home of scholars, poets, and philosophers as well as a library; whereas, in the rival city of Pergamon, the museion also included a collection of art. This notion of the museum as a place dedicated to knowledge, an assemblage of texts and artefacts that were valued and stored, was to become a powerful instrument in the European project of modernity. In the early modern era, rulers, explorers, traders, artists, and other citizens gathered and displayed artefacts in Wunderkammer, or “cabinets of curiosity”. They were usually the

To place in common  21

product of pilgrimages, conquests, and expeditions. These collections were not just reflections of the eccentric journeys of traders or the expansive influence of rulers, they were also expressions of “a thirst for knowledge and a love of the sublime” (Van Hout 2011:  124). The formation of the Wunderkammer is an early example of the interplay between the affective and the normative, from the intuitive and organic displays of objects of wonder, to the systemic arrays that demonstrated an encyclopedic overview. In the sixteenth century, private collectors assumed the freedom to assemble and reassemble sculptural antiquities, recent paintings, embalmed specimens, feathers, leaves, shells, globes, astrolabes, and coins as well as architectural fragments in specifically designed rooms or cupboards. The whimsical combination of objects, that would otherwise be remote from each other, and the possibility of creating a microcosm, were as much an expression of joyous wonder as they were research stations and, less charitably, understood as naked displays of brutish conquest by Europeans. Driving these collections were beliefs that art could mimic the beauty and force of nature, and that the process of gathering and juxtaposing was itself a spur for creative imagination and deeper understanding. The use of cabinets and plinths in the Wunderkammer borrowed from the techniques of veneration developed by the medieval church to display sacred relics. The relics, like the icons that were supposedly formed through divine mediation, were arranged according to a religious hierarchy that directed the gaze of the spectator towards a state of veneration. The aim was to distinguish the value of the object from the banal, and thereby separate the sacred from the profane. As a sealed container, the vitrine reinforced the significance of the object by separating it from the touch of mortal hands and the rub of daily use. Inside the vitrine the authority of the object was suspended from time and place, conveying a sense of permanence and immortality. To some extent, the Wunderkammer adopted these “funereal” techniques, but also invented a new, spectral and material configuration between art, nature, and the cosmos. They were a glimpse into a new world view as much as a catalyst to induce sensory pleasure. At first, the Wunderkammer were held in palaces and private dwellings, but, in a relatively short space of time, the location of the collection was redefined as a public space and the narrative by which the contents were displayed was elevated beyond an idiosyncratic view of the world. This practice of collecting, that entwined personal prestige and political authority with economic, cultural, and scientific clout, became one of the main sources of the modern museum. In the sixteenth century, when the Wunderkammer first appeared, religious authority was still dominant. According to Van Hout, the Wunderkammer marked the breach in this order, “as it threw up a spirit of intellectual cross-​fertilization between art and science as a harbinger of the Enlightenment” (2011: 124). By the end of the seventeenth century there was a realignment of the museum’s private/​public boundary and the beginning of a mode of knowledge production that was to be influential from the Renaissance into the nineteenth century (Bann 2008: 118).1

22  To place in common

The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford –​one of the master moulds for museums –​ was built in 1678 to house the Wunderkammer gifted to the University by the collector Elias Ashmole. It was part of a growing public knowledge system. By contrast the Peabody Essex Museum in the United States has its origins in more instrumental footings, being the legacy of the East India Marine Society established in 1799 by a group of Salem-​based sea captains. They instituted themselves to share naval knowledge for circumnavigating the globe, and their Marine Society served as a depository for the “natural and artificial curiosities” that they collected on their journeys. It is not difficult to see that the original purpose was therefore more concerned with “broadcasting the messages of power throughout the society” (Bennett 1995: 61). Many museums were also the consequence of eighteenth-​century forms of enlightened despotism and revolution, with some rulers identifying the public value of their collection (such as the Fridericianum in Kassel), while others had their royal collections nationalized and reformulated for them (as in the Louvre in Paris). When the Assemblée Nationale decreed in 1793 that the Louvre was to be reopened as a public museum, it announced that the “nation’s masterpieces” and an assembly of the “monuments of all the sciences and arts” from across the world would be on display. Central to the establishment of the Louvre as a public museum was the break from the celebration of aristocratic genealogies and reverence towards Christian stories, and the beginning of a proclamation of the French Republic as a great chapter in the secular history of humanity. This was a decisive moment in the function of the museum, as it shifted the narrative of display towards explaining the link between national development and the emancipation of humanity. The Louvre may have been the first national museum, but earlier on in the eighteenth century, connoisseurs, such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, had already advocated in favor of displaying and narrating private collections for public education (ten Thije 2017:  23). A  decade before the Louvre opened to the public as a national museum, Christian von Michel had the temerity to organize the collection of paintings at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna according to national schools and in chronological order. To the horror of the critics (Bazin 1967: 159), the curator dared to make “visible a history of art” (Rampley 2013:  10). The legitimacy of the museum was being pulled away from the aristocratic setting of the salon and re-​established as a national institution that could demonstrate the educative institution for scientific Enlightenment values and embody the modern vision of progress. However, the link between scientific endeavours and the representation of national values was often rather murky and coded in racial hierarchies.2 Public museums were also key institutions in the European nation-​building project. In 1830, two significant German museums opened: the Glyptothek in Munich and the Altes in Berlin. They were both influenced by Romantic ideas that promoted the importance of engaging a wider public but, unlike the French revolutionaries, they separated the progression of cultural

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narratives from political ideologies. In these grandiose neoclassical buildings visitors were encouraged to experience art not through the burning expression of revolutionary ideals, but in a cool, detached, and contemplative manner that was in keeping with the earlier idea of worshipful connoisseurship and the emergent perspective of aesthetic judgement. For instance, the influential idea of Bildung –​as a model of personal education, aesthetic sensitivity, and social cultivation –​that was promoted by Wilhelm von Humboldt, relied on institutions like the museum for the public to produce rounded citizens. Through their display of historical, cultural, and artistic artefacts, museums provided an explanation of how civilizations evolved with Europe at the apogee. It provided the reference points for positioning the citizen in the nation and the world at large. As Borja-​Villel points out: the roots of the museum can be found in the pure reason of Kant, which starts out from an idealist, Eurocentric worldview. The modern age began with Europe’s expansion in the world and the centrality it conferred upon itself, in keeping with which it not only dominated the world system, it also ignored the existence of the Other. Europe imagined its particular history as though it were universal, and what it achieved as a power centre it attributed to its own creativity –​as a closed, autonomous, self-​ referring system.3 Thus the museum gave form to civilizational progress as a precept  –​it contained a regulative moral and instructed the visitor in the correct way to view history. This precept model created the impression that history moves in a straight line, defined the role of successive generations of artists as contributors to this cumulative narrative, and opened up a space for public engagement through a form of “educative leisure” (Hanquinet & Savage 2012). In this way, it constituted a specific perspective that was different to how the Wunderkammer encouraged the viewer to see the world. The focus shifted from the sensory appreciation of the sublime to a normative understanding of oneself as a citizen in the nation. As the public walked through the space of the museum, it not only provided “a self-​sufficient center of a universal history of art” (Liefooghe & Van Den Driessche), but it also reflected back to the viewer that he or she was both judge that could internalize the value of the objects held in the museum, and defendant, that could prove his or her level of cultural competence. In short, it reinforced a gaze of authority and a mode of compliance to a specific sensibility. During this modern foundational period, the museum not only proposed a vertical global hierarchy that placed European cultures at the pinnacle, but it also took a more active role in shaping civic life. The separation of art from everyday life resulted from the belief that artists distilled complex experiences into the form of beautiful objects, and that other experts, such as curators and art historians, could present these objects in a way that

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was meaningful and uplifting for the ordinary citizen. The function of the museum was thus tied to consolidating the cultural identity of the citizen and addressing them “as responsible individuals who shared a common set of moral and ethical values” (Klonk 2009: 16). In the most benevolent version of this project, the shaping of civic ideals and cultural subjectivity was underpinned by the belief that all humans are part of a single family, and that the visitor who entered the museum was granted the opportunity to pay homage to, and learn from, this collective world culture. Promoters of this outlook were often motivated by contrasting goals that ranged from the purely aesthetic mission of stimulating the imagination to the more instrumental effect of generating social cohesion. In its most deluded extremes this “exhibitionary complex”4 was stretched to suggest that the national museum was the holder of the supreme examples of artistic achievement and world knowledge (Macdonald 2003: 3). The “exhibitionary complex” was evident in the manner that the public were presented with a world view that they were supposed to internalize as a narrative for their own moral progress and the betterment of their cultural awareness: this was the rhetoric of […] power made manifest not in its ability to inflict pain but by its ability to organize and coordinate an order of things and to produce a place for the people in relation to that order. (Bennett 1995: 67) For the working class, the experience of entering a classical museum was belittling. Ignorance of canonical art history, and the overt uses of bourgeois codes of conduct, made them feel like trespassers. The museum was thus a site that would convert the raucous and unpredictable behaviour of the “wretched mass” that was evident on the street and in a festival, into the refined and restrained parade that was modelled on hushed awe and the supplicant behaviour of the devout before an icon in a church. This was part of the activity of governing the population:  to discipline the unruly mobs that preferred carnivals and ribald events and turn them into an obedient citizenry. The “exhibitionary complex” was also evident in both the pioneering Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, which as early as 1815 was established to display only the work of living artists, and the paradigmatic Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA), founded in 1929 (Bann 2008: 120). At MoMA the display of art was structured by a linear chronology that defined Post-​ Impressionism as the origin of modern art and showed its evolution through Cubism and Abstract Art. This narrative format gave priority to the advances in formal objectives as expressive of the progressive outlook of modern subjectivity in the West. While its initial configurations gave some space for the passive contribution of non-​Western artists, it remained a Western-​oriented museum in its collecting, and one in which experimental painting and

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sculpture were presented as the supreme artistic expressions of the modern. In the post–​Second World War era, the construction of museums of modern and contemporary art based on the MoMA model spread rapidly throughout the major cities of the West. It was part of broader push in the Cold War to promote the American lifestyle, and the CIA provided enormous funds to establish MoMA’s international programme. The exhibitionary complex in the colonial era –​such as the British Museum –​operated through the appropriation of objects from across the world and their incorporation into a singular frame, whereas in MoMA we saw an institution defining a new modern style and allowing itself to be used as an export agent to the rest of the world. Global power was not just displayed in its assembly of objects, but also in its campaigns to promote Abstract Expressionism. In more direct ways MoMA inspired the expansion and redesign of museums such as the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Van Abbe in Eindhoven, which were also originally established as private museums. MoMA’s most influential impact came through Alfred Barr’s, the founding director, schema on the evolution of formalist progression in modern art. This multi-​arrowed flow diagram provided a dramatic shift away from the nationalist paradigms and the unidirectional line of progress. Similarly, the purist architectural form and emphasis on neutral design at MoMA provided a striking counterpoint to the loaded excesses of the neoclassical style of the older classical museums and became the default setting for all modern museums. The interiors were no longer designed to resemble mini-​palaces of the aristocratic collectors, but rather, the white cube resembled the scale of a typical modern art patron’s luxury New  York apartment, and it was designed to intensify attention on art’s formal structures.5 Uninterrupted by the signs of everyday life, the viewer could contemplate the work of art as a world in and of itself. Borja-​ Villel summed up the aspiration of the modern museum as a stripping down of all contextual distraction: If we were capable of removing everything that could obstruct our view, if we were to present art with total transparency and without interference, the significance of it, its reality, would be apprehended automatically by the spectator, who would then become a passive factor.6

Tensions in the twentieth-​c entury museum: the assault by the artists Even before MoMA was built, there were artistic challenges against the idea of the museum as a neutral space for displaying the evolution of knowledge. As early as 1919, Kasimir Malevich had already predicted that the modern museum would collapse from the weight of its accumulation of historical acquisitions and meld with all that the flows in contemporary life (Malevich 2003). However, for Malevich the objects that were relevant were not

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necessarily the most recent. The museum could still function as a laboratory for re-​examining historical legacies and inventing new functions. Similarly, El Lissitzky’s concept of Prouns (Projects for the affirmation of the new in art) was not a simple rejection of all that is old, but an activation of the vitality of mixture and mobility. Rather than seeing paintings as static objects to be held in frames, and architecture as an exercise in resisting the force of flow, he proposed that the space of the museum was a hybrid and dynamic space. Together with Laszlo Moholy-​Nagy, they designed the last rooms in Alexander Dorner’s Hannover museum as spaces of sensation and motion. In these rooms works of art could be moved around and the order rearranged to demonstrate new possibilities. For the surrealists, the interior and static world of the museum was equated with the frigid space of a mausoleum. André Breton was repulsed by the museum that he saw as encrusted in “religious compositions” and “rustic allegories”. Instead, he embraced the “thousand more real enchantments” that awaited him on the street (Breton 1927). The white cube was no longer seen as a neutral space that was insulated from the outside, but as an extension of the commercial spaces of consumption where the senses were numbed. It is significant that the radical stripping away of sensuous gratification, mystical adoration, or meandering reverie that became the shared preoccupation of a generation of younger artists from the later 1960s onwards was engineered by works in combination with the spaces they were shown in (or not shown in, vide land art and happenings). (Taylor 2010: 251) In 1967, Robert Smithson echoed the surrealists when he declared that “museums are tombs” that expunge the energy of an artwork. He criticized the persistence of a bland universal history, complained about the stultifying effect of the muted atmosphere of reverence, and was frustrated by the separation of high art from everyday life. Smithson believed that the “bright lights” of the museum only served to conceal the “abyss” that exists between the differences inside the museum and the congealment of vital energies that operate outside. “The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that immobilize the eye” (Smithson 1967). The odious association between museums and museal made them seem like a depository for dead things. The critic Thomas McEvilly summed up the role of the museum in the loss of the viewer’s freedom and the increasing commodification of art by attacking the myth of whiteness: In classical modernist galleries, as in churches, one does not speak in a normal voice; one does not laugh, eat, drink, lie down, or sleep; one does not get ill, go mad, sing, dance, or make love. Indeed, since the white cube promotes the myth that we are essentially spiritual being –​the Eyes in the

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Eye of the Soul –​so we are to be understood as tireless and above the vicissitudes of chance and change. (McEvilly in O’Doherty 2000: 10) Given that museums retained the power to resist and ignore the calls for change, artists developed new visual strategies and turned towards their own museological experiments. Marcel Duchamp assumed the role of collector and curator of his own portable micro-​museums; Kurt Schwitters totally transformed the rooms of his home. Daniel Buren, one of the pioneers of site-​specific art, was also infuriated by the museum’s myopic “viewpoint” (Buren 1983 [1970]). At the same time that Smithson was railing against the museumification of culture, the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers was inventing the “fictitious museum”. In Broodthaers’s imaginary museum, he could assume the various roles of director, designer, curator, and educator, and reorder the system of classification that separated high and low to introduce new connections between the permanent and ephemeral, fiction and fact. In the following decades, artists like Hans Haacke,7 Andrea Fraser, and Fred Wilson8 developed an even more trenchant critique of the museum. They chose to speak truth to power by revealing the contradictions and hypocrisy of the museum’s operations. This involved an analysis of the museum collecting practices, exposure of selection criteria, and investigation into the economic relationships with collectors and board members. They tried to push museums to confront their relationship to patriarchy, colonialism, and exploitative capitalist practices through their institutional critique. These voices and actions presented contradictory viewpoints: on the one hand, they provided an affirmative insight into the direction for reform; on the other, they articulated a fatalistic conclusion that museums had no capacity to respond to change, and the museum is where radicalism goes to die.

After institutional critique Artist-​led critiques of the museum shone a new light on the uneven relationship of the institution to creative experimentation and democratic equality. Bart De Baere is more sanguine about the future of the museum and its relationship to radical activism. For instance, while he noted that the avant-​garde initially adopted an anti-​museum stance, as it wanted to “march out into the world”, he also pointed out that it eventually realized that its influence was confined to the design of tables, clothes, and instruments, and that it had failed miserably to transform the politics of everyday life, let alone halt Nazism and genocide. The post-​Second World War avant-​garde emerged from this trauma. It was therefore less outward oriented, more reflexive, and even tended to head towards an “Inner Emigration”. By the time of the 1980s, artists were once again seeking to reconfigure the boundaries between private and public as well as challenging Eurocentric perspectives. At one level,

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this amounted to another withdrawal from the space of the museum, but it also extended the challenge for the museum to reformat its operations and revitalize its relevance.9 Vasif Kortun is even stronger in his pessimism, when he claimed that each time an “art practice emerges in a critique of the institution it is at the same time an attempt to pursue a dialogue with a zombie” (2018a: 1). However, not all institutions were convinced that they had been condemned to the realm of the living dead. The opening of the Pompidou Centre in 1977 was designed as a place where art and everyday life could meet. Within the transparent structure of the museum, there was a deliberate channelling between the library and the cafe, the cinema and the gallery, and with opening hours that suited the night economy, the museum was reconfigured to shift the balance between sociality and pedagogy. People gathered there to see other people gathering, they ascended the escalators to admire the urban view, and they enjoyed the buskers playing music. Art became incidental. Soon other museums would follow by branding themselves as a social venue where business meetings, diplomatic ties, and erotic liaisons could be forged. At this crucial juncture the function of the museum was increasingly spliced with the entertainment industry. Tony Bennett’s concept of the “exhibitionary complex” is extremely useful as a heading for explaining the role of the museum in creating a historical subject that shared a collective memory of national history and occupied a distinctive place in the universal development of human civilization. However, in the twenty-​first century we see the role of the museum as entangled in an “infotainment complex”. Andy Warhol got it half right when he predicted that: All department stores will become museums and all museums will become department stores. The mission of the museum has also expanded to resemble both a department store and a theme park, “answering all of one’s needs from shopping, restaurants and kids entertainment” (Kortun 2018b: 3). Success is expressed in terms of growth, turnover, and the professionalization of its service delivery. The visitor is increasingly identified as a consumer, and their experience is measured in purchase rate and consolidated through customer loyalty schemes. It has also responded with starchitect-​designed facades, expanded cafes, programmes that embrace DJs and fashion designers, while also purporting to uphold its hard-​earned gravitas. En route it has developed a split personality: “under intense political pressure to meet the demands of mass-​commercialism, it is at the same time expected to fulfil its duties to high culture. It must be serious and fun at the same time –​both elitist and populist” (Timms 2011: 33). In Eastern Europe, an old joke still circulates: “the situation is catastrophic, but not yet serious” (Dolar 2017: 77). As early as the 1980s, museum directors started to go along with neoliberalism either out of ideological commitment or the vague sense that they were meant to keep up with the times. The spirit of compliance directed them to be model pupils instead of offering resistance and alternatives. Bart de Baere recalls the meeting in which the legendary

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Dutch and Belgian magazine Kunst & Museumjournaal was wrapped up, and one museum director declared: “Museums don’t have to think, they have to make exhibitions!” Another member stated:  “I can use my PR budget in a better way”.10 In this era, museum directors and curators increasingly felt the pincer of self-​imposed manic productivity and new public organizational discourse. The boards of museums were increasingly filled with executives and entrepreneurs with expertise in accounting and marketing, while artists and art historians were nominal token figures (Alexander 1999: 31). A new breed of cultural policy advisers were gaining traction with their narrative of the role of the arts in social cohesion and the building of regional hubs that would lure further investment (Kong 2014; Mason 2013). The dominant responses in the art world have been twofold:  either an anaemic wish “that the hell we live in today is momentary” (Kortun 2018b: 5), and therefore the plaintiff request for the reinstatement of the welfarist model,11 or else a zealous advance to demonstrate that the museum was also one of the fit and able competitors in this new landscape. Well-​meaning arts advocates loaded the air with bathetic motherhood statements about the inspirational role of art, and went all out on the defensive by pointing to the economic benefit of an inclusive culture, demonstrating that more people are employed in the cultural industry than they are in agriculture, and stretching their data on attendance to demonstrate that the arts has a productive role in tourism. In the process of establishing how art is linked to social cohesion and contributes to economic regeneration, they have thus stripped it of “any meaningful effect”.12 As one curator pointed out, the irony of this new regime of corporate culture is that “we are doing this to ourselves” (Drabble 2013: 26).13 The museum has become entangled in a spectacular matrix of boundless consumerism, as well as being an exclusive hospitality provider and an agent of soft diplomacy. Like the mirror rooms created by Yayoi Kusama, the public is invited to savour their vanity as they re-​post themselves in the “same selfie” taken by Katy Perry, all the while indulging in the promise of what Borja-​Villel calls “life in the infinite present” (Esche & Borja-​Villel 2016: 409). While most public museums are still nominally funded to provide pedagogic outcomes and engage with debates on national identity, they are also expected to perform against commercial criteria and compete with other players in a new cultural event economy. Hence, they are increasingly rivals to wealthy private museums that have deeper pockets and fewer constraints on how they operate in the art market, let alone serve their visitors. In this complex ecology there is no monopoly on civic virtue and cultural knowledge.14 Nevertheless, public museums are often trapped in a nervous state that oscillates between nostalgia and anxiety, that, as Jimmie Durham noted, results in the invention of desperate “new dance steps” that are meant to look like they are an expression of “energy”.15 Vasif Kortun is even more scathing. He claims that the new priorities of the public–​private partnerships

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are made visible in special events that are conjured for an exclusive “pre-​ public”. After the special events are over for this elite group, the residual forms of exhibitionary display are passed on to the general public like “the leftovers of a sumptuous feast”.16

The other story As the museum was shifting from an exhibitionary to an infotainment complex, another significant challenge was also gaining visibility.17 After 1989, it was no longer tenable to confine the scope of contemporary art to the West European–​North American axis. The “transatlantic affair” was first destabilized, then amended and partially overtaken by new regional alliances. These reforms included the reformulation of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the consolidation of links in the Arab world, and the realignment of former colonies in the Global South. The geopolitical transformations were matched by the assertion of new cultural histories, such as the Latin American and Arab contributions to modernism and the repositioning of perspectives on indigeneity and hybridity. The formation of new platforms for contemporary art in the early 1970s, such as the biennials of La Habana, Sydney, Istanbul, and Dakar, initiated much of this development, especially as they turned their attention towards historical rewritings in the 2010s. With the emergence of new loci and new narratives in the art world, a twofold problem for European and Eurocentric museums emerged. First, the narratives of art history needed to be rewritten, not only to include a greater diversity of participants. Second, there was the even more fundamental challenge to redefine the existing frameworks and perspectives to represent modern and contemporary culture by constructing relationships across cultural differences. The old vertical modern hierarchy was clearly untenable and new modes of translating across cultural differences were needed. From postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, it was evident that the macro view on the context of global art was in need of radical expansion, but it also became clear from a micro examination on specific artistic practices, that the precept model was no longer viable. Artists seldom work in a linear and cumulative manner, nor do they constrain their aesthetic interest within fixed territorial boundaries and traditional ethnic bonds. There are numerous examples of artists who have resisted the imposition of monocultural frameworks. Among others, Kerry James Marshall made strategic attempts to incorporate otherness; Sheela Gowda and David Hammons developed cunning hybrid techniques to sabotage what they saw as the pincered space of “identity politics”; Hito Steyerl’s early work incorporated both her own body and autobiography into films about hybridity and the media archive. In an interview in 2011, Jimmie Durham could not be more blunt on this matter:  “I’m accused, constantly, of making art about my identity. I  never

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have. I make art about the settler’s identity when I make political art. It’s not about my identity, it’s about America’s identity” (2011). Identity politics is not a given but an ongoing practice, as demonstrated by Ricardo Brey, another artist from that generation who refused to confine his status as a representative of his Cuban origins and aligned himself with the European arte povera tradition while also embracing Iranian Sufism. The admission of diversity into that narrative of the museum threatened to decentralize the image of a coherent national culture and the linear narrative of historical progress. Yet, real progress is slow and uneven. More than a generation has passed since Rasheed Araeen curated the exhibition The Other Story (1989) in order to reveal the inexcusable omissions and blind spots in the British canon of modern and contemporary art history. In the exhibition catalogue for the pioneering Documenta XI, Okwui Enwezor stressed:  “the postocolonial today is world of proximities. It is a world of nearness, not an elsewhere” (2002: 44). And yet, more than another decade later, Enwezor introduced his recent survey of contemporary art Postwar:  Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic 1945–​1965 with the same complaint against the “geopolitical bias that has tilted to the advantage of the countries that emerged victorious in the war” (2016: 46). While the dominant institutions have been challenged to confront the legacy of their colonial footings, the poverty in their collections of representative works from non-​Western artists, and the persistence of primitivist categorization have limited their capacity to develop adequate curatorial strategies (Enwezor 2003: 57–​82), there is still a resistance from the old museum guard and, as noted by Nancy Adajania, “what remains undiscussed is the manner in which paradigm shifts in the understanding of what constitutes globality, globalism, globalization or the global contemporary have been attempted outside of the West” (2015:  353; italics in original). A survey of British art museums goes so far as to conclude that these ideas had “little purchase in the national museum sector” and in particular, that the “permeation” of the extensive discourse on postcolonialism was “slow and fragmented” (Dewdney, Dibosa & Walsh 2013: 10). Given that the function of representing the ideal of a national community with shared historical memories, common cultural values, and unique beliefs was one of the foundational aims of the modern national museum, the status and scope of difference started to haunt the museum. All around the world  –​from London to Berlin, Paris to New  York, and Hong Kong to Abu Dhabi –​museums are working to expand their collections. In this era of globalized contemporary art, the emphasis now is on retrospectively institutionalizing a new history; partly as a corrective to the long-​established, yet discredited Eurocentric perspectives of modernity, partly as a cultural-​diplomatic endeavour to inscribe regional history into a global context. The response of many museums has been to adhere to the principles of expansion:  just as the art market grew

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in tandem with economic development, they are now seeking through inclusion to compensate for the disbarment from the canons of the past, dominated as they were by Western institutions. (Franke 2017: 5) The most prominent example of a museum’s effort to expand the scope of international entrants into the family of modernism, and become “attuned to the murmurs of cosmopolitanism” (Franke 2017:  7), is the Louvre Abu Dhabi. This is how one critic describes the representation of global culture in the Louvre Abu Dhabi: A bronze statuette of the Egyptian goddess Isis nursing the infant Horus, from 400–​800 bc; a fourteenth-​century ivory Virgin and Child from France; and a nineteenth-​century carved wood mother and child from the Democratic Republic of Congo together project a common image of maternity across cultures and millennia. (Holland 2017: 21) For Jonathon Jones, writing in the Guardian, “a new global museum in the Arab world with an Arab perspective is a revolutionary subversion of the old European imperialism of knowledge” (2015). More like a supplement than a subversion! While it is easy to note that this kind of encyclopedic universalism tends to gloss politics of appropriation, and it is comforting for some to expose the hypocrisy and pretensions that appear elsewhere, the truth is that the complicities start at home. For, as Borja-​Villel notes, few museums realized their own republican ambitions of addressing all their own people, let alone making those from the suburbs and the countryside feel welcome and equal. Similarly, the exporting of cultural models that juxtapose cultural differences does little to dislodge the entrenched power hierarchies by which the West does the curating and the rest are curated. In the end, Western canonical objects remain as the reference points against which other objects come to gain meaning. There is a type of multiculturalism that is actually the cultural form of neoliberalism. It celebrates diversity almost as if differences were merely formal, as if they emerged naturally and simply had to be placed side by side in order to achieve some kind of universal harmony. Just like that, without political mediation and without revealing the social origin of the construction of these collective identities and the reasons why they have been treated differently. As a result, the pluralist idea that everything should be represented in a museum actually ends up hiding the problem of why a museum is an institution that leaves out certain things in the writing of history. You cannot simply put all the styles or movements side by side, because then you hide the conflicts between certain positions

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and ultimately reinforce the most conservative hegemonic visions of art history. (Borja-​Villel & Exposito: 2017: 127; italics in original)18 Critics of the role of culture in the new global economy have noted a paradoxical correlation between the debasement of values and the enriched valuation of exclusive global luxury art products. They note that appreciation gathers without any rational or aesthetic basis. It generates its prolific exchange value purely from its own speculative logic of appreciation (Boltanski & Esquere 2015). Hence, institutions like the Tate, Louvre, MoMA, and Guggenheim increasingly exist in a realm of the exceptional. A few may join them there, but only at the expense of detaching themselves from their local arts ecology and depoliticizing themselves. All the while the gaps between themselves and the smaller institutions become insurmountable and the art histories they convey become ever more fixed to the wishes of their luxury sponsors/​clients. The recent opening of the Louvre Abu Dhabi is the pinnacle of this trend. It is a new hybrid institution: neither an outpost nor a franchise of the Louvre. The Louvre brand and access to its collection have been purchased for $1.5 billion over a fixed period while the museum acquires its own collection. Its appearance on the “Island of Happiness” has been described as “Arabic-​ galactic” (Holland 2017:1). But for Steven ten Thije, a curator based at the VanAbbe, who believes that the historical development of the museum is tied to a democratic discourse of engagement, deliberation, and enfranchisement (ten Thije 2015: 103), this is a fatal turning point: “the two museums in Abu Dhabi are a sign of the imperfection of the present geopolitical system. The museums are reversing the course of history. They are palaces not of democracy but of the oil princes” (2017: 57). These palaces not only run against the vein of their own national cultural heritage, but they appropriate the ideology of cosmopolitanism at the same time as they are reinforcing a hierarchical order of communitarianism (Krebs and Mermier 2019: 308). Charles Esche echoes this lament as he reflects more widely on the condition of the museum: No longer underwritten by governmental aspirations to prove their nation’s civilized credentials, cultural institutions of all kinds are thrown into the hands of private patronage, or forced to seek survival through generating direct financial returns in the market. This pressure to find new economic justifications for their existence is at the same time being challenged by incompatible political forces coming at them from opposite directions. On the one side are new internationalist decolonizing /​demodernizing reformers looking for different ways to repurpose historical narratives and redirect power flows through the institutions. On the other hand, the new “alt-​right” is growing more persuasive and sees the cultural field as a vital battle ground on which to win a new generation for ethnic nationalism. (2018: 3)

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Alongside the economic imperatives ushered in by neoliberal regimes came the revolution in communication technologies. The most tangible benefit of the new communication technologies was the opportunity to democratize information flows. The digital tools promised to release communication from rigid spatial boundaries; to offer near infinite memory banks; to simplify the mixing of genres; and to make a seamless flow between the production and reception of ideas and information. The proliferation of screen culture has reconfigured the cognitive ability for narration. Stitching together fragments of information, creating connections from diverse sources, mixing digital inputs with bodily experience, and developing an ambient awareness is now banal (Papastergiadis 2016). Suddenly, there was massive status inflation of public users. Every receiver was either elevated to the role of navigator or referred to as a narrative co-​producer and curator of their own cultural experience. For artists like Phillippe Parreno, the museum was no longer a “timeless space of stasis” but a “responsive site” that enabled artists and the public to reconfigure the function of an exhibition as a “durational medium” (Balsom 2016: 250). In augmented reality it is the new modes of participant spectatorship that “trip up perception” and undo the “heterotopic character of the museum” (Harrasser 2015: 384). This development stimulated expectations away from the idea of Bildung or rounded education, and headed towards becoming a service provider of immersive environments and multidimensional installations that “give” the visitor a satisfying affective experience. In the more commercial and instrumental versions of this scenario, the visitor is now addressed as an active player, whose experience is directed by sensory cues and affective states. They are encouraged to follow their feelings, to make decisions according to their emotions, to not fear the feeling of an aimless wander or to be distressed over the risk of being lost, and to open themselves to the unexpected. These anxieties were mitigated by the prior demarcation of the museum as a safe, rational, and ordered place. This prevailing, but often unstated, frame of reason and control creates a paradox: on the one hand, there is no focus point in the environment, no linear perspective, and this encourages the viewer to have a sense that they are surrounded by stimuli and are free to stitch together a narrative, to form their own collage from the ambient generation of information, which may be considered as an emancipatory shift away from the distanciated gaze and disembodied stance encouraged by modernism; but on the other hand, this worldliness is carefully scripted and regulated by hidden algorithms. While this space is promoted under the banner of freedom, and visitors are increasingly “instructed” to be the author of their aesthetic experience, there is little opportunity that their individual experiences will coalesce into a collective form, let alone impact on the external world. Vasif Kortun has named this kind of experience as “powerless socialization” (2018a:  3). It has the appearance of creating a public, but it also deprives individuals of an effective way in which their

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collective voice might be heard. They gather, and participate, producing multiple signals, but, according to Kortun, the pattern of flow is akin to Brownian motion, as there is no movement towards self-​determination, just a form of “managed inclusivity” (2018a: 4). Meanwhile the authority of the museum is placed on an ambiguous level. At once it appears relevant by adopting contemporary communication technologies, but it also seems even more remote and separate from everyday life. To bridge this gap, museums were remodelled to appear like other places, not just commercial galleries and fairs, but also like bars, clubs, and abandoned factories. As it has expanded beyond the “exhibitionary complex” and become part of the media-​saturated urban environment, it has also demanded new “paracuratorial techniques” and become incorporated into complex cultural assemblages (McDowell 2016). The dispersal of art into everyday life has extended in so many directions that the distinction between an artwork and an ordinary object is now less relevant than the elucidation of “what aspects of our environment are not art”.19 Or more positively, there is now an opportunity to shift the idea of the museum from purely a custodial role over aesthetic objects and directing the research and activation of the art object towards a “post curatorial approach” that focuses on its discursive and potential narrative forms and where different subjectivities are assembled around a project (Kortun 2018a: 2). With this shift of emphasis away from the idea of universal history and civic cohesion and onto personal and affective experience, there is a growing lament that the public sphere is inexorably fragmented, if not diminished, as it has been reconfigured into multiple sphericles for cultural memory, political agency, and social connectedness. The impact of the new communicative technologies has meant that the critique of the institution shifted from identifying, classifying, and interpreting the objects in a museum, to an understanding of the museum as just another point in a wider communicative practice.

Where will L’Internationale head? The aim of the confederation is to both provide a response to the limits faced by individual museums, and offer a viable alternative to the prevailing tendencies in the globalizing art world. Even the Reina Sofia is too small to offer a genuine base for artistic refuge. “Neoliberalism”, Borja-​Villel claims, “has taken away our ground”, leaving us “trapped between a past in which we don’t recognize ourselves and a present we don’t like”.20 It is a kind of cultural version of prosopoagnosia –​you stare at something familiar but none of the features are discernible. L’Internationale can never be a monster, but it has the potential to adopt a molecular structure.21 They proclaim to be “a space for art within a non-​hierarchical and decentralized internationalism, based on the values of difference and horizontal exchange among a constellation of cultural agents, locally rooted and globally connected”.22 L’Internationale

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aspires to become too big to be controlled by any local power base, and diffuse enough to defy any singular aesthetic style. For the directors of the respective museums that established L’Internationale, the options of either individualized globalization or resurgent nationalization are equally unbearable. They have realized that the aim of becoming a global icon relies on possessing an exceptional status, and the defensive pathway adopted by other city-​based or national institutions was at best a short-​term solution. Both reactions entrenched the neoliberal agenda as the only viable cultural horizon. Three alternative challenges provided a spur to rebuilding the museum as part of the commons. First, there was an urgent need to re-​ examine the historical relationship of cultural power. Second, it was necessary to explore the democratizing potential in the new aesthetic practices and communication technologies. Third, it was vital to go beyond the traditional assumption of a homogeneous local public, and embrace the multilayered nature of the museum’s audiences and constituencies. In this context, the general mission of L’Internationale can be broken down into three broad aims: decolonizing the imagination, democratizing the institution, and instituting the commons. 1. Decolonizing the imagination compels a departure from colonialist orientations and modernist attitudes. The cultures of the South can no longer be seen as if they were mere “raw” materials that could be extracted and processed by the agents of the North. It calls for an appreciation that the interpenetration of the world’s cultures has also brought forth new demands of equality and respect, as well as greater understanding of the hybridity in all forms of cultural production. The decolonizing of the institutions of art is more than an attitudinal shift. It has also spurred a rethinking of the organization of collections, the identification of multiple historical narratives, the partnership with artists to expand the archival sites, the development of transnational curatorial programs, and in more general terms, the reorientation of historical knowledge around issues of urgency and the exploration of affects. In the era of global mobilities, it no longer makes sense to evoke either a universal culture or a homogeneous public. Such foundational ideas for museums are little more than expressions of economic power and cultural narcissism. They privilege the dominant imperial or national cultures as the apex in a global hierarchy, and mask differences within the empire or the nation. Today, difference is both unavoidable and ineradicable, as is hearing the voices of the “plural South”23 in the ear of the North. The South is therefore not a discrete geopolitical region, a critical double move of unveiling the colonial matrix of power and delinking from the accumulated promises of modernity as expressed in the manifesto produced by the collective of artists, curators, and writers from the South known as Decolonial AestheSis (Ferrera-​Blanquet & Rojas-​Sotelo 2013).

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The challenge for L’Internationale is to generate pluriversal narratives: in which identity is defined in a relational rather than fixed manner, and the interplay between the part and the whole opens towards multiple connections and chronologies. The plurality of publics is not an adjustment phase nor an extension of the normalized formatting of culture. The construction of a new commons will occur through the realignment of the flows between the locals, regions, and global centres, which not only “favours bridging between local specificities”24 but also consolidates the “desire to be a bridge between localized anchors and the world”.25 However, these “bridges” between localized specificities, regional connectivity, and worldliness do not merge into a new totalizing framework, or fold back into a national microcosm. 2. Democratizing the institution is not just a matter of expanding public access to the museum. It has also meant a radical rethink of the public as a constituent whose presence shapes the museum. This expanded notion of public agency was at first evident in the evolution of artistic practice, in the shift of emphasis from creative autonomy to cultural collaboration. L’Internationale embraces a model of display and mediation where creativity is distributed more openly between the protagonists. The sanctified artwork or artist at the apex of the museum pyramid is displaced, and the artist collaborates with curators, mediators, and the public to produce the realization of an aesthetic proposal within a collective and reflexive context. In the words of Charles Esche: It is about putting the artist in play as a creative figure in a constellation, rather than holding them up as an omniscient oracle […] the artist is necessary to create any capacity to imagine the world otherwise. But it is the artist no longer in the service of “ART” but in the service of social transformation.26 This horizontal dispersal of creative production both liberates the artist from being the sole provider of meaning and acknowledges that change occurs in the interaction between different participants. The function of mediation is thus expanded to embrace the wider dynamic of social interaction and institutional responsibility.27 In this context, the distribution and authorship of ideas also spreads outwardly. The place of the artists is “taken seriously”, but it is neither automatically at the centre nor at the top of this process.28 Everyone has responsibility to shape the message. Or as Gilles Deleuze said, creativity occurs in the “middle”, and from this position the potential for democratizing culture is enhanced (1990). 3. Instituting the commons is produced through the coming together of diverse agents to interpellate a shared agenda, and in the context of L’Internationale it has found its most vivid articulations through initiatives such as the Glossary of Common Knowledge: where multiple

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stories are generated through the tactical pooling of resources and people in artistic collectives, social movements, and universities.29 This practice of instituting the commons cuts against both the generic formation of museological narratives and the phantasmagoric ideal that Europe is founded on a common culture. In both of these hegemonic formations difference is at best tolerated insofar as it enters as an equivalent to an already validated and pre-​existent form of cultural identity. Instituting the commons is not posed, once again, as if culture possesses a fixed and enclosed shape, or as if it arose from a singular origin and trajectory. On the contrary, insofar as there is a discernible shape that comes from instituting the commons, it is marked by protruding misfits and signs of work in progress. It assumes a form that is both open and responsive to the other. It is for this reason that instituting the commons inspires anguish and dread in those who prefer distinct institutional boundaries, agreed categories for classification, and a fixed position from which to measure and survey adjacent cultural domains. From Syntagma Square in Athens to the Urban Commons Council in Turin, the European-​wide movement of the commons is instituting systems of assembly that neither conform to the old certitudes nor converge into the reinforcement of familiar narratives. It is a modality that embraces the commons as an ongoing process that is instituted through robust dialogues with difference.

Place matters in a mobile world These three headings on decolonization, democracy, and the alignment with the worldwide movement of the commons do not flow easily together. There are numerous obstacles that disrupt the transition from the idea of the third world to the plural south, from no border activism to one-​world cosmopolitanism, from civic democracies and the welfare state to instituting the commons, from the myths of progress and universality to pluriversal and demodern cultures.30 Similarly, while the aims of L’Internationale are clear, their realization is not easy to track. It will require new tools and conceptual frameworks that can unpick the colonial matrix of power.31 Since the first collection of texts that L’Internationale produced, they have been willing to ask the most urgent and difficult questions, such as: What is the purpose of dialogue in a relational field of visual practice. Is it a means to more object-​ based work or a material end in and of itself ? How do issues that figure on a planetary scale fit with the old discourse of the local and the global? What is the status of ephemeral debris, and does the sacred still require a protective barrier in a contemporary art institution? Is it possible to reconstitute the commons in the context of radical plurality (Holler 2015:  38–​39, 96–​105)? However, it is must be noted that it not easy to measure how these questions can be answered. In museum studies, most evaluations tend to focus on the

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impact of individual museums in terms of their support of artistic practices, development of cultural knowledge, interaction with local communities, influence on national culture, or economic partnership in cultural tourism. As a confederation, the significance of transnational collaboration requires more than widening the frame and extending the points in a comparative evaluation. L’Internationale’s activities should not be confined to producing longer lists of artistic programmes, and a wider network of agents delivering cultural impact. Similarly the knowledge produced through a confederation should be more than the sum of the contents in six, seven, or more silos. A confederation should be more than an aggregating formation. Therefore, its evaluation will require different tools that can address the collapse of the space of artistic autonomy that was central to the modern project, and open itself to a new critical acceptance of art’s relation to a global politia (Esche 2011: 12). This will require a postnational framework, one that develops a different sense of scale and recognizes the forms of attachment and topographic relations that artists forge as they move from one city to another, participating in biennales that are proliferating across the world, and engaging themselves in emerging exhibition platforms that are shaped by a cosmopolitan character (Piotrowski 2015: 347). The complexity of trans-​ institutional processes and the challenge in developing postnational frameworks are compounded by the unbounded format of visual practices and public interactions. L’Internationale will need to attend to the new kind of cross-​cultural relations, respond to the mediated forms of intimacy that are forged across vast distances, and keep pace with the accelerating feedback between producers and consumers. But who is the expert on mobility and mediation? What is the ideal vantage point for evaluating either an interactive installation by Rafael Lozano-​Hemer or the misty horizons of James Turrell? Which critic will endure the full duration of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) or grasp the near infinite shuffle of scenes generated by the iterative algorithms in Stan Douglas’s Suspira (2002)? How will we decode the use of video in Gerard Byrne and Sven Anderson’s The Visibility Matrix (2018) when the medium demands to be registered not as a sequencing of discrete images but as an “active signal”, and the use of the gallery is forced to compete with the media-​saturated environs of the airport lounge, shopping mall, and family dinner table? What kind of political and artistic agency is at play when a visitor engages with Tania Bruguera’s Museum of the Arte Util (2013) or enrols in Ahmet Ogut’s The Silent University (2012)? These situations would require not only a capacity to adopt multi-​ perspectival viewpoints, and an ability to translate across unprecedented cultural and formal differences, but they also prompt the recognition of a more perplexing phenomenon, a mode of spectatorship that is formed through what I call “ambient perspective” (Papastergiadis 2016). A revolution in the methods for defining context and value is called for.

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Future trajectories It is also uncertain whether L’Internationale is in itself sustainable. To date, it survives because it has found ways to exploit the contradictions within European funding structures. I cannot predict whether the confederation is like a temporary eddy formed by an outgoing current, whether it will thrive as it outruns its rivals or will elude capture because it is simply too big and too diffuse to contain.32 There is also the internal risk that the members, whether from exhaustion or distraction, may fail to maintain the momentum of its early phase. The unhinging of support structures from local and national settings has produced new challenges of scale that Vasif Kortun regards as unleashing an “existential problem within the museum field” (2018a:  5). The flow of capital is moving to locations and institutions that correspond to the logic of brand identity. This has meant that small and medium-​sized operations are dropping out of view and large-​scale institutions are consuming all ends of market demands for culture. “Smaller operations are not octopoid in reach, they are not tooled to accommodate branded projects or complex sponsorship schemes. The middle continues to evaporate, or it is forced to shape up under intensely privatized and competitive cultural spheres” (Kortun 2018a:  5). The lines of fracture between the interests of artists and civic movements such as Gulf Labor and institutions like the Guggenheim are evident on a global scale. Similarly, the tension is also evident between boards that are increasingly stacked by “leaders” inculcated by a corporate mission to impose “best practice efficiency gains”, and the expectation that the museum is a place of respite from, if not critique of, the rules of the market. This conflict is playing out across all the public institutions in Europe. Citizens are resenting the experience of being reduced to consumers. For now, many remain aghast as they witness public institutions being stripped and the benefits being transferred to the elites. But for how long can this frustration last? Can L’Internationale’s common pursuit of democratic equality, decolonizing, and institutive exchange gain any traction in a time in which the European project is moving towards increased forms of fragmentation and inequality? If the European Union is embracing neoliberal economic rules for competition, can a confederation of museums realize the cultural project of unity through diversity? Charles Esche and Bart de Baere argue that the tensions and contradictions that are threatening the European project are making the case for the existence of L’Internationale all the more pressing: “It makes a demand on the EU to see itself not only in legal and economic terms and to remember something it seems to have forgotten in its desperation to service the market”.33 If we were to map the activities and aspirations in contemporary art, what would it really look like? It is not hard to draw the lines of movement that plot the sites of origin with the places of work.34 This would produce a familiar map, one that is not that different to the global flight paths of the major airlines. However, we are equally familiar with the resistance that artists generate when critics and curators categorize them according to regional identities.

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Can we therefore produce a different mapping of the structures of belonging, one that flows from a sense of place in the world in relation to three scales –​ our body, a community, and the world as a sphere –​and then overlap this with civic, national, and cosmopolitan forms of belonging? I am sure this kind of map would resemble a kind of wobbly Venn diagram. However, beyond a diagrammatic sense of interconnectedness, this image also speaks to the complex forms of political solidarity and institutional networking that are necessary in the art world. Contemporary art now operates in bundles of social relations and is entangled in a multiplicity of cultural references and artistic media. This has produced a radical challenge in both aesthetic evaluation and normative critique. The good and the worthy are neither equivalent nor impervious to each other. For all the shortcomings and failures of the museum, Chantal Mouffe rightly warns that an exodus from its institutional footings will leave the cultural sector more barren and even more bereft of space for political participation (2013). The real challenges for L’Internationale are to be found amongst the ruins of both the state welfarism and global neoliberalism, while also working amongst a wide range of constituents and within a horizontal framework of democratic participation. Given that museums are no longer sanctuaries for the preservation of art for art’s sake, and they are implicated in the global crisis of deindustrialization, decolonization, migration, and climate change, as well as have to both navigate through the ideological terrain of neoliberalism and interactive communication platforms, then surely, it is time to develop tools that enhance trans-​national, trans-​institutional collaborative practices.

Notes 1 This discussion on the Wunderkammer and the transformation in the function of the museum have been informed by discussions with Jasmin Pfefferkorn, and her research on the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart. 2 The link between the story of the progress of human civilization and racial and national identity was made even starker in the newly formed ethnographic museums (Macdonald 1997: 34). 3 Borja-​Villel, interview, Madrid, 1 September 2016. 4 In Bennett’s earlier exploration on the “exhibitionary complex” (1995), he drew heavily on Foucault’s key concepts of discipline and discourse –​discipline as the techniques by which specific subjectivities are realized, and discourse as the emergence of speech that is not just the individual utterance but the condition of social sphere of language that makes individual speech possible. More recently, Bennett adopted the concept of “governmental assemblage” as an attempt to correct the previous focus on the museum’s pedagogy in terms of rational and cognitive thought processes, and give greater attention to the deployment of techniques by which the public were free to shape their own experience (2015). The shift in the conceptual frame sought to capture both the range of ways in which cultural freedom is experienced, and also the profound consequences on the political discourse that frames the function of the museum:  in the eyes of advocates of the cultural industries, the museum has shifted from a bastion of high culture to

42  To place in common another platform in the entertainment–​leisure sector. This shift in status is also accompanied with a set of claims about the widening of the modes of agency. Hence, Bennett stressed that the public does not consume cultural experiences in a passive and uncritical manner, but neither does the public possess a degree of autonomy that is separate from the context in which culture and society develop a discourse on action and identity. This tension is made more manifest through the shift in pedagogy. Museums now give greater emphasis to emotional and affective experiences over an educative and cognitive function. By shifting the focus onto the sensory, affective, and emotional experience, the function of museums moves away from their primary commitment to producing a universal truth and foundational role as the guardian of national culture. Bennett’s emphasis on governmental assemblages does give wider scope to the non-​coercive cultural strategies for social engagement, self-​regulating modes of participation, and representation that operate within and conform to the neoliberal agenda. However, this mode of culture reintroduces the disciplinary operation of the museum at the very point at which it is bound to a network that decentres the authority of the museum. 5 Although it must be noted that there was no consensus on the signification of whiteness; for Malevich it was a spiritual colour, for Corbusier it summoned peasant simplicity. See Taylor 2010: 249–​252. 6 Borja-​Villel interview, Madrid, 1 September 2016. 7 A classic example is Haacke’s “Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holding, a Real-​Time Social System”, that was to be shown at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971. The project aimed to expose the fraudulent activities of one of New York City’s largest slumlords by amassing objective information about the 200 tenements and the structure of their ownership. Haacke’s one-​person show was cancelled and the curator was fired. The artwork was subsequently purchased by the Whitney Museum, and in an accompanying text, they claim that the show at the Guggenheim was cancelled “for fear that this work, and one other to be included in the show, might result in legal action”. Works like these discredited the pretence of the museum’s interior as a neutral place of aesthetic display. 8 Artists like Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson also developed artistic projects that revealed the complicity between the museum’s structures and masculinist bias or Eurocentric perspectives (Gielen 2013). Wilson would “interweave” his own art with works from ethnographic collections to reveal repressed histories and racist hierarchies, while Fraser adopted a fictional alter ego that conducted lecture tours of galleries in order to both mock the inherent reverence and expose the lack of representation of art by women in the museum’s collections. These artistic projects combined didactic reasoning with aesthetic forms of display and performance, and more generally, they were indicative of a sustained period of questioning of the status of the aesthetic object and critique of the structures of display (Putnam 2001). 9 Bart De Baere, interview, Antwerp, 12 September 2016. 10 Bart De Baere, interview, Antwerp, 12 September 2016. 11 As worthy as this form of protest was against funding cuts, this plaintive disposition obscured the disintegrating effects in the civic sector as it had already been subjected to a managerial logic that had less and less to do within its local contexts, and also ignored the more trenchant critiques from the left, such as Brian Holmes (2016a, 2016b), who argued that these cultural institutions failed to expand their

To place in common  43 audiences beyond a narrow and diminishing band of middle-​aged, middle-​class, white metropolitan visitors and, for this reason, he condemned them for perpetuating the class divide in cultural capital and excluding the rapidly emerging communities. Recent sociological surveys of public attendance at art museums in Belgium confirm this criticism of exclusion and the perpetuation of privilege through the delivery of “educative leisure” (Hanquinet 2016). 12 Email correspondence with Charles Esche, 6 February 2017. 13 There are very few signs of hope for a new beginning (Krecic 2017: 19), but the Belgian sociologist of culture Pascal Gielen, who has worked with M HKA, insists that the space of the museum has not been entirely crushed. In a defence of the persistence of a residual form of cultural autonomy for the arts, he also argues that the museum can also constitute a space of exemption (Gielen 2013: 28–​29). There is a loss of space for criticality in the institutions and they must find ways to deepen the engagement with the local and extend dialogues with partners that can produce a resonance with other professions and groups in civil society. In this way the project of L’Internationale should go deeper than simply becoming a network of interconnected museums across Europe. This would risk detaching them from their own specific contexts and rendering them as UFOs that hover above the ground. (Gielen interview, Antwerp, 10 September 2016) In another important response to the neoliberal crisis, the authors of “Defense of the Post-​Autarkic Museum”, argue for an approach that builds on the centrality of the collection in the classical model of the museum; embraces the anachronism of curatorial approaches; and celebrates artistic practices that involve a mode of public engagement based on a return to reading the object as a form of interior dialogue between the mind and the object outside of it. It calls for a slowing down in the pace and a deeper reflexivity that is consciously out of joint and always incomplete. It celebrates the aleatory nature of all museums and expects the public to relish regional sensitivity (Liefooghe & Van Den Driessche 2016). On the other hand, there is a significant body of literature that outlines a cosmopolitan turn in museums, giving greater emphasis to the function of dialogue, translation, and transculturation (Clifford 1997, Levitt 2015; Macdonald & Fyfe 1996,). 14 While cultural institutions have a long history of private sponsorship in the United States and in Europe, the boom in Euro-​American museum building that occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century has been dwarfed by the massive global spike that has occurred in the past two decades of the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. During this later period, the total number of museums in the world has doubled (Rocco 2013). However, the distribution of these resources and the impact is uneven. The one-​off success story of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has been a curse that has been repeated with very mixed success in Brazil, Australia, Taiwan, Germany, Mexico, Las Vegas, Finland, and even Abu Dhabi. Fortunes have been wasted on consultancy scoping exercises, and public funds that were established for artistic projects were diverted into auditing exercises. According to the current director at the Guggenheim, “it’s a rare week when [he] doesn’t receive at least one request to build a museum somewhere in the world” (qtd. in Grincheva 2015: 120).

44  To place in common Venerable institutions have been turned around to increase visitor income by embracing the age of “infotainment”, and by expanding their gift shops and cafes to ensure that lingering in a public space can be translated into profitable consumption. Parallel to this change in the state’s rationale for supporting culture has been the growth of the private art market that has produced a new art world ecology of private museums and personal house museums, with over 300 being built in the past decade (Franklin &Papastergiadis 2017). By the end of 2018, there were already 190 private museums in Shanghai alone. Public institutions have therefore been forced to compete with the private sector while increasingly relying on private wealth and patronage to keep their collections up to date. 15 In an ironic postcolonial twist, the independent curator and critic Murat Alat pointed out that while SALT had not learnt from the non-​hierarchical structures developed by L’Internationale, because it already had built itself in this form, Turkey had more to gain by seeing that such a pioneering model was not only legitimate but also an effective way of engaging in civic and artistic exchange (Alat interview, Istanbul, 25 September 2016). 16 Kortun describes the risks of museums becoming “zombie” institutions: In short, when museums with a public service mandate enter, as non-​capitalist institutions, in the late-​capitalist economy, they enter a field in where they have no public endorsement and have to abide by the protocols of #instant assessment, #short term efficiency and #becoming the servants of the moment in which they operate. The kernel of the problem lies in the tension between these contrasting economic models and the way the historical public institutions and contemporary capitalism have completely different ideas of what public good constitutes. (Kortun 2018: 4) 17 The historical example of the Wunderkammer encouraged curators such as Jean-​ Hubert Martin to adopt techniques that sought to sidestep the “over-​ institutionalized” nature of museological precepts, and experiment with their intuitive connection of works that would otherwise be remote from each other, and play with dramatic narrative formats and theatrical light settings (Putnam 134–​140). While this form of critique of the museum was also an attempt to reinstitute aesthetic value, it also tended to reinscribe colonial cultural frameworks as well as reinforce the consumerist fantasies of exotica (Steeds 2014). 18 Of course, Borja-​Villel notes that there are exceptions. Museums like MACBA and RS responded by arguing that the space of the museum could be compared to an agonistic vision of public space –​where the marginalized and oppressed voices have the right to contest hegemonic national frameworks. This shift into an agonistic perspective for the public sphere was influenced by the writings of Chantal Mouffe, who worked with a number of the institutions in L’Internationale (see Agonistics 2013: 85–​105). A key moment in manifesting this idea was the staging of the MACBA Triennial in 2001: The aim was to challenge some of the fundamental categories of success and failure in art and politics. To go beyond the fetish of the singular art work, and to appreciate the significance of other texts, images and labor. In particular, to use the Museum as a platform for public interaction, that allows the transfer

To place in common  45 of some of its resources to activist groups, who in turn develop new collaborative projects. This led to new partnerships with LGBTI groups as well as activists in local politics and artist collectives. Parts of the antiglobalization movement were suspicious at first, that an institution like MACBA would be a partner. However, a number of actions spawned from these initiatives. The different collectives organized themselves in “agencias” (the word having, of course, Deleuzian reminiscences) which promoted a campaign for free money, produced a showbus to interact with audiovisual programmes in the different neighborhoods, a photography section to document the activities of the social movements, etc. It provided the example of how new kinds of cultural activity could emerge from interstices of the street and the institution. The other key point was to shift the focus of the collection. In the past, the collection policy tended to split the purchase of art in three ways, from a national cultural perspective, iconic works that spoke to a global brand, and the emergent artists. To face the deeper challenges of the contemporary and to break with universalizing schemas and to make difference more manifest I adopted Glissant’s concept of the oral. I focused on the document, the ephemeral and the performative. (Borja-​Villel interview, Madrid) See also the L’Internationale exhibition held at M KHA (“Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art after Identity Politics”, 2014, curated by Anders Kreuger and Nav Haq), which sought to bypass the a priori oppositional frameworks between identity and alterity. In the process they offered an alternative grid for placing the relationship between art and identity along a peer-​to-​peer spectrum of conversational exchanges and ephemeral documents. 19 Borja-​Villel interview, Madrid, 1 September 2016. 2 0 Email correspondence with Manule Borja-​Villel, 7 February 2017. 21 I have used the word monster on different occasions, but I am not sure I would use it now here. We do not seek to resurrect an old colonial order, because we are in a new colonial order. We are a privileged part of it. That’s why self-​reflection and a permanent form of interpellation is necessary. I have always been very uncomfortable with the word “confederation”. It reminds me too much of a former order, of a bourgeois structure. That’s why, even if we are transnational, I think it would be more important to say we are a molecular structure. Also, our problem is more than with a “local power base”, it is the national structure as well as with the art system as such. In a moment, when self-​precarization is the rule, it is difficult to think that by escaping local powers we are just escaping the system. Transnationality might give us some advantages, but it may be naive to think that it is a major factor of freedom. (Email correspondence with Manuel Borja-​Villel, 7 February 2017) By contrast, Ferran Barenblit, the newest member of L’Internationale argues that its structure is emergent from aspirations and affects: L’Internationale bases itself on coordinates that are different to other trans-​ national organizations. From the beginning it has refused to operate in many of the fields in which others have worked. Basically, because they are already covered, so no new actions in these directions are needed, but also because they are predictable, flat and in many times they reinforce the enemy that they are announcing as they are fighting. L’Internationale focuses on people rather

46  To place in common than organizations; in emotions rather than juridical status; in aspirations rather than quantifiable results. L’Internationale is much more about “who you are” rather than “what you do”, even when it considers that there is no action with a meaning […] There is also the importance of sheer endurance and “being”. Our violence is to exist. (Email correspondence with Ferran Berenblit, 6 February 2017) 2 2 http://​www.internationaleonline.org/​confederation (accessed 6 November 2017) 23 Teresa Velasquez, interview, Madrid, 3 September 2016. 24 Email correspondence with Charles Esche, 5 February 2017. 25 Email correspondence with Bart De Baere, 5 February 2017. 26 Email correspondence with Charles Esche, 5 February 2017. 27 The public experience that arises from the spaces of L’Internationale is already captured by new techniques of representation, such as blogs and posts that combine sociality and discursivity. Inspired by early experiments at MACBA and events at SALT, the effort to redefine the status of public audiences, visitors, and participants as constituents has been a collective effort that has also drawn from partnerships with academic and artistic institutions such as Liverpool John Moores University, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Stiftung Hildesheim Universität, and University College Ghent School of Art. This complex interplay between pedagogy, activism, and aesthetic pleasure has eluded many of the critical studies on museums, which either exaggerated the institution’s capacity to “mould the perception, behaviour and aesthetic judgement of spectators” (Klonk 2009: 11) or, as Borja-​Villel noted, were overly “melancholic” They fail to recognize that the museum is based on a discourse that necessarily implies a narrative fact (the stories we tell or show by means of a series of works, events or documents), as well as publics that appropriate these narratives for themselves, questioning them in accordance with expository mechanisms situated between the two. (Borja-​Villel 2016: 36) 2 8 Email correspondence with Bart De Baere, 5 February 2017. 29 The Glossary of Common Knowledge, curated by Zdenka Badovinac, Bojana Piskur and Jesus Carrillo: http://​www.mg-​lj.si/​en/​events/​40/​glossary-​of-​common-​ knowledge/​, accessed 12 May 2018. 30 Walter Mignolo’s response to this question is both valid and also too abstract: There are many directions that each of our relinkings and re-​existings can take, given that this process lies in what unites the human species: our bodies. […] today it is of the essence to relink with earth, with Pachamama (mother earth) as it is voiced in the South American Andes. (Mignolo & Nanibush 2018: 25, 29) 31 It is now over half a century since Indian president Jawaharlal Nehru defined the principles of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia that brought together representatives from twenty-​nine nations in Africa and Asia. In 1955, President Sukarno described Bandung as the “first intercontinental conference of coloured people”. While Yugoslavia was not present at the Bandung conference, it drew on the principles of independence movements, but also developed a distinctive foundation for the Non-​Aligned Movement (NAM).

To place in common  47 Even though both promoted economic and cultural cooperation between the nations of the global South and opposed colonialism, NAM went further in developing a transnational network of small and middle-​sized states. NAM was formed in 1961 at the Belgrade summit with 25 participating countries and by 1979 it had grown to 100 members. NAM functioned as a social movement in the international system, a third way between the two blocs, aiming to change the existing global structures and create a more just, equal and peaceful world order. It was an anti-​imperialist and antiracist movement that represented the first major disruption of the Cold World geopolitics. (Bojana Piskur and Zdenka Badovinac in email correspondence with Nikos Papastergiadis, 2017) The mere staging of these events was considered as a challenge to Western dominance and an inspirational moment in the protracted process of decolonizing the imagination. One of the enduring legacies of Bandung has been the commitment to enhance solidarity amongst the formerly colonized people, and develop new South-​South networks of political, economic, and cultural exchange. However, while the initial optimism in Bandung has acquired a kind of fetish status in postcolonial consciousness, the ambition to decolonize cultural politics does not square with the emergent geopolitical transformations. Along with the spread of authoritarian regimes and the embrace of neoliberal globalization in the South, it has led some commentators to complain of an intellectual “deficit of accumulation” with recurring bouts of “forgetting” (Weber 2017: 151), but others go further, as they describe the current period as both weakening the earlier advances and regressing towards “the depoliticization of democracy” (Stokke & Tornquist, 2013: 4). The eminent British political theorist Perry Anderson has gone so far as to claim: “Across the ex-​colonial world of Bandung memory –​India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Burma, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Sudan –​national liberation is an empty word, that typically means the opposite” (2018: 50). 32 As Marcelo Exposito acknowledged, there is the persistent risk of falling back into the neoliberal traps that L’Internationale set out to overcome. However, he also added: L’Internationale needs to be given the time for its own realization. It is neither a permanent institution, nor a project with discrete and instrumental goals. It needs to generate its own momentum. There can be a dual strategy whereby the mega events that are highly visible and generate both symbolic and material surpluses are articulated with small capillary projects that stimulate new forms of experimentation. The surplus of the former can activate the emergence of the latter. In this sense, it can contribute to a new European public sphere, but this is a vision of Europe from below, and at present, we only have glimpses in places like Italy and Greece, of how these movements can produce new forms of organization. (Marcelo Exposito, interview, Madrid, 3 September 2016) 3 3 Email correspondence with Charles Esche, 6 February 2017. 34 www.internationaleonline.org/​research/​politics_​of_​life_​and_​death/​94_​data_​visualisation_​on_​artists_​migrations_​research_​in_​progress (accessed 12 November 2017).

Figure 3.1 The Making of Modern Art: A Story about Modern Art (2017), curators: The Museum of American Art Berlin, Steven ten Thije, Charles Esche, Christiane Berndes. Archives Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Photo: Peter Cox.

Chapter 3

Conviviality as governance

What are the voices that summon different museums to confederate? Is it a sonorous intellectual command to rise above, or a pragmatic rumbling to bolster defences? Or, are there other voices like the deeper murmurs from another world, a way of calling for something else to come forth? If these “other” voices really do transpire, then they would not be confined to either a reformist plea to fix up your representative structures, or the violent threat to tear down your house. Their existence would suggest that there is a new game out there. Yet, even when such voices are audible, there is the risk that they are, at first, patronized as if it were the worthy but hollow call for a back-​to-​basics approach, and then deemed as nothing but a messy, crazy, kind of incomprehensible muttering of a bar-​bar-​barbaric utterance. In short, these other voices are registered as the dreaded confrontation with disordered notes that accompany the spiralling descent into chaos. In this chapter I seek to explore the expressed motives and emergent structures through which the members of L’Internationale have come to work together. It speaks to an “unspoken ambivalence” between conviviality and governance; it acknowledges that institutions tend to suck up the desires but do not always produce the spaces that can enable these feelings to form more attachments and spread (Berlant 1998: 4–​5). Hence, I will consider whether the contradictory tendencies can be organized relationally so that people can collectively produce something that is not confined to the master code of control and command. Inevitably, there is a pragmatic aspect to a trans-​ national and trans-​ institutional collaboration that is the making of L’Internationale. The story can be told in defensive terms –​“the mutualisation of resources”, or alternatively the affirmative “ethics of solidarity” and the promotion of a “common heritage” can be stressed (Petresin-​Bachelez 2015). None of the partners in the confederation can thrive as an island and rejoice in their splendid isolation. They each need the diversity and strength that come from the confederation. The distinctive identity of each of the partner institutions is evident in their unique administrative contexts and financial structures. For instance, SALT is privately funded in Turkey, Van Abbemuseum is supported by the municipality of Eindhoven, and the Reina Sofia is a flagship national

50  Conviviality as governance

institution in Spain. By coming together under the financial umbrella of EU funding bodies, they will no doubt have new contextual roles to perform and administrative briefs to acquit. However, before we submit the identity of L’Internationale to the rules of governance for EU projects that promote cultural integration, let us also tune into the possibility that deeper forms of change arise from discordant and dissonant voices. If we hastily dismiss or impatiently compress these voices into old scores, then there is the risk that the creative urge that propels this summons will be rendered inaudible, or worse, the interpellation will be no different to an instruction to fall into line. This struggle to register the emergence of a new voice was evident in the critical reception to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. At first, critics complained about her complex use of language. It was assumed that she was being way too clever and all too poetic. Morrison responded by stating that she was simply listening to the rhythms and tensions of a history that was for so long just kept out of range. She claimed that she was not trying to invent a new formal order, and that she had no intention of simply describing the tools of torture, such as the “bit” that was forced into the mouth of slaves, but rather, she wanted this “bit” to work as an active instrument that makes the reader feel what it is like to be both muzzled and sense the coming forth of another language as it resonates in the present. For Borja-​Villel, this ethico-​aesthetic effort to give “voice to those who are outside our discursive construction –​ that is, outside our system of intelligibility” is an act of “interpellation” (Borja-​Villel 2017a: 20). In this chapter I take heed of the heady challenges outlined in the previous chapter: the cumulative effects of multiple waves of institutional critique, the resurgence of conspicuous consumption amongst the collector elite, the revolution in communication practices and neoliberal economic management that have one by one and all together rocked the museum. One indicator is the decline in the institutional organizations for international solidarity amongst artists, curators and critics. In the Second World War many artists and curators enlisted in their national armies or took up arms and fought in the resistance. After the war they became even more committed to the belief in internationalism as both an antidote to fascism and as the proper context for art. These former combatants were instrumental in forging the mission statements of new organizations such as the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). In the past decade, these organizations have lost much of their bite, and it is clear that the lessons from the worldwide movements that champion the common ownership of social wealth, and the trans-​national experiments in artistic collaboration and self-​organization offer a number of alternative starting points. By contrast, many of the institutions of art have become so top-​heavy in infrastructure and regulation costs that they risk destroying their capacity to engage with the flux of contemporary art. There is a deeper question here: it is not confined to whether institutions can become more nimble, but rather, can they develop

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a spirit of informality that reflects the emergent forms of cultural agency and collective intelligence? The challenge of informalism is not unique to the governance of L’Internationale but symptomatic of a wider crisis in leadership. We are in a moment of profound historical transition: the old vertical models of governance are collapsing but no adequate replacement is in sight. There has been a great deal of critical enthusiasm dedicated to the emergence of horizontal modes of organization, but the decision-​making process within such transversal processes have often been obscured. In the stated aims of L’Internationale’s mission there is a recognition of the nexus between artistic practice and social transformation. But how is this link articulated within the emergent structures of L’Internationale? By turning to face the coming together of the museums in L’Internationale, I will, in this chapter, also ponder the paradoxes of modern leadership and social organization. Will it create a new kind of noise, or just fortify the institutions so that they can claw back the “good times” before neoliberalism? Does it offer the space for museums and art institutions to move beyond a defensive restitution of their imagined autonomy, and genuinely present an alternative to the “franchise” corporatist strategies of other museums? In short, how will it avoid the monopolization of decision-​making in a centralized apparatus, enable sustainable modes of feedback and produce new social relations through collective negotiation? These questions are not confined to L’Internationale. The European Union is also confronted by existential questions about its own models of governance and leadership. The idea that it could evolve around some shared principles that are mutually compatible with national values is increasingly dismissed as too vague. Equally, the proposition that it could integrate the existing national institutions into an overarching framework that regulates and supersedes the local structures is also deemed too top-​heavy and untenable. So what is left? Into this void of governance there now appears a series of loose affiliations and tactical arrangements that are increasingly focused around xenophobic reactions and neoliberal policies. The disappearance of any grand vision, the desperate pleas to put a brake on “regressive subordination”, and the prevalence of bad options is hardly satisfying (Streek 2019: 133).

What is a confederation? Unlike either a loose cultural network or an economic franchise system that extends its brand through an affiliation with horizontal branches, a confederation is a political structure that seeks to enhance regional cooperation and reduce hierarchical forms of power relations. An older example that was not mentioned by the directors of L’Internationale was the idea of the congress that was, during the period of decolonization in Africa and India, adopted as the model for fostering dialogue between different revolutionary bodies and for facilitating the exit from colonial rule. Charles Esche, inspired by the

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writing of the Kurdish revolutionary Abdullah Ocelan, advocated for a confederal model of governance. A political confederation is a continuous process of negotiation through an asymmetrical assembly of partners. It tends to redistribute authority by adding an overarching layer of executive deliberation, and ensures balance by including equitable representation from each of its members. In this arrangement, the flows of power are comparable to the orbit in a heliocentric galaxy. The planets are aligned, but the smaller ones are neither dragged into the pull of the larger ones nor consumed by the radial centre. Bart De Baere declared that he promoted the concept of confederation not only because he “deeply detested the late 80s notions such as network or consortium”, but also because he wanted there to be a real and enduring commitment to “negotiating diversity”.1 This governance model puts great stress on the principle of coming together without the intent of subsuming their respective identities. It has inserted a number of layers for the partners to meet and deliberate, but it has not produced a new senatorial level of authority. It seeks to redress the pervasive sense of a democracy deficit that laces the organization of most arts institutions, and draws inspiration from the principles of democratic confederalism  –​equal coexistence, self-​organization and grassroots participation in a non-​state social paradigm (Ocelan 2011:  33). Hence, the locus of power is neither concentrated in a new central location nor redirected towards the dominant region. Similarly, the direction of power does not flow from the global top down to the local bottom. On the contrary, the confederation is meant to encourage a form of coalition in which power whirls in unexpected locations and produces a state of mind “in which the superfluities, redundancies, ambiguities and zigzags are tolerated in preference to Cartesian linearity and simplicity” (Carter 2005: 7). In this process, power is constituted in the regions of its use and it is spread through a horizontal pattern of “confluences” (Serres 1995: 122). The confederation has not been built on a constitution that formally outlines the rules of representation, mechanisms for reward, duties of care, and avenues for appeal. While there are no formal rules that have been articulated to protect the weakest members and regulate exchange, there is a prevailing ethos that has convinced Ferran Berenblit, the newest director, that this “loose a-​central structure with no capital, no leader, no central power, allows multiple groups to come together without the larger ones dominating the smaller”.2 From this perspective, the concept of a confederation is paradoxical. On the one hand, it reinscribes a “bourgeois” parliamentary concept that is “embedded in an enlightenment vision of moral and political organization”3 to speak back to the dominant neoliberal discourse. On the other hand, it uses the symbolic capital of culture to remind the “European agenda of the reality we should be in rather than the condition it is in”.4 Charles Esche also stresses that the critical edge and shared ideological positions amongst the teams is crucial to ensure that L’Internationale is capable of “creating a plural museum field”:

Conviviality as governance  53

We see ourselves as part of a non-​hegemonic occident perhaps, a series of places rather than spaces, that represent specific contexts in Spain, Slovenia, Catalonia, Turkey, and here which is why it’s so important that it’s a confederation in which independence is maintained in L’Internationale. You see that in the collections and in the stories that we tell. That canon has to be dismembered differently in changing circumstances and parts of it can be reconfigured in ways that are agonistic towards each other but share a goal of rejecting universalism. So it’s not an augmentation or agglomeration of a single new narrative, which is what I  think the rewesternising institutions such as Tate and MoMA are doing, but an embrace of what we can call pluriversality and different ecologies of knowledge that again allow the body to come back in, allow indigenous knowledge to become present in our institutions.5 It’s important to distinguish L’Internationale from the franchise model and many networks of cultural institutions that have arisen in the recent past. The franchise model in the business world combines large and small entities into a singular administrative unit. It purports to promote growth by expanding the market for successful products; to gain on research expenses by sharing its internal expertise; and to stimulate additional investment partnership schemes. With the appointment of Thomas Krens as a director in 1988, whose highest qualification was in business administration rather than art history, the Guggenheim pioneered the development of the museum as a trans-​national neoliberal marketing institution. From the outset Krens was unequivocal that the museum’s collections should be traded as assets, the “brand” identity of the museum prioritized over its contents, and that their viability depended neither on state support nor single-​source income streams, but on a diversified and trans-​national franchise network. From the outside, it appeared that the museum’s tools and assets that could not be monetized were “orphaned”. Hence, the “outdated role of the keeper/​connoisseur” was increasingly replaced by precarious network of “curators entangled in a grid of collectors and dealers” (Kortun 2018a:  2). Over the next three decades, the Guggenheim branched out into partnerships with luxury development companies, corporate sponsors, and government agencies to establish satellite institutions. In each instance, the partner pays a rental fee for loans, commits funds for acquisitions, shoulders all the building and programme costs, and in exchange, they gain access to the Guggenheim’s iconic name, personnel, and collection, all in the hope that it will lead to a spike in tourist expenditures and secondary investment opportunities. The income that the Guggenheim has received from these ventures is vast: a typical rental fee is between $20 and $30 million. While it is almost entirely free of any state support, it has also led to a stacking of the board’s membership to reflect its alignment with the global players in entrepreneurship and corporate investment, whereas the

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participation of artists, critics, curators, and academics now hovers around 10 per cent (Grincheva 2015). By contrast, the idea of a “network revolution” (Petresin-​Bachelez 2015) was, for a period of time, seen as a liberating system in the professional art world. The network was meant to be a sprawling system that could challenge the authority of the centralized and vertical hierarchy. Given that museums were belated participants in what Ralph Miliband called the “de-​ subordination” movement (1978), there was also a slow embrace of the idea that horizontal networks could overturn the traditional vertical hierarchies of cultural authority. Networks were designed to break up centralized authority structures, enhance peer-​ to-​ peer knowledge exchange, and capitalize on the democratic potential of new communication technologies. However, is the world just an elaborate network? Network is not a neutral term. It has become associated with weak bonds and short-​term opportunism –​good for immediate impact but not sustained effort. Bart De Baere is adamant in his opposition to the term “network”. He sees it as a mere “description” of the relations that are typical of the neoliberal order. By contrast, he claims that the concept of the confederation was a “notion that emerged organically, it is for us an anti-​model, it comes from the condition of sociality and it is a product of our own action”.6 Pascal Gielen goes even further and claims that there is a strong ideological link between the concept of the network and the embedding of precarity: In a neutral definition, a network consists of interconnected points. It can only exist because there are connections, as we know from actor-​network theory. When the connections are broken, the rhizome evaporates with them. The word “evaporate” clearly indicates the weakness of a network configuration within a wet playing field and evokes the volatile or at least temporary nature of such social connections. What’s more within a liberal network economy these temporary collaborations are controlled by competition. This is why project-​like thinking is so dominant in the current order. People only temporarily drift together, to then float collectively while realizing a project, after which their swimming lanes often diverge again. Relationships arise because there is a collective goal for a short while. (2013: 22) Gielen claims that a network only comes into existence in contemporary market conditions because of pragmatic ties and instrumental links. It does not possess any affective bonds or ethical obligations, and therefore, in the realm of social construction and personal demands, the structure of connectivity is loose and ultimately dependent on contingencies of contact. When links fall into disuse, then the network also fades. Collaboration in such a network is purely project driven and goal oriented. A museum in a network

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of museums would be little more than a station that momentarily holds, or a switch point that redirects the units in flow. On one level, the image of a network even compounds the loss in moral status and intellectual authority that has occurred in the museum sector. A network of museums risks being equated to any other kind of commercial alliance, such as the global partnerships of rival airlines. Given the mobility of artists from all over the world and the plethora of communication technologies, circulation in a network is a banal description of the given global predicament. It fails to address the bias and blockages in the system, as well as the less publicized links between networks of patrons, museums, auction houses, and collectors that determine art market value. Bojana Piskur concurred that the image of the network emphasizes a system of circulation that produces thin relationships, and that it is preferable to use a concept such as a confederation that speaks more to “the common cultural politics and values that were central to the friendship of the founding directors”.7

On friendship If we are to register the other voices in the summons to come together, then we must recognize the ideal of confederation as more than a political structure for compromise, and trace how the confederal desire comes from affective bonds. Anecdotally, members in the confederation acknowledge the importance and pleasures of friendship. However, the significance of friendship is seldom seen as anything more than the supportive background. Recently, curators like Celine Condorelli (2013), Cristina Camara Bello, Bojana Piskur, Miklavz Komeji, Ana Mizerit (2014), Zoe Butt (2016), and Ruth McDougall (2018) have sought to highlight the vital role of friendship in developing knowledge, criticality, and the means for working through the challenges of cultural production. They stress that the ability to deepen understanding of cultural protocols, appreciate alternative ideas on value, and transmit techniques requires an atmosphere of exchange that “money can’t buy” (McDougall 2018: 210). Zdenka Badovinac, in The Heritage of 1989, her re-​ enactment of the last utopian Yugoslavian exhibition, also stressed the condition of fellowship and the commons. Here we are particularly interested in the Yugoslav experience of sociality, as it developed in the habitus of brotherhood, unity, collectivity, and solidarity. In the context of the exhibition The Heritage of 1989, this experience, or ability, of sociality, we call “the commons”; by doing so, we seek to connect the historical Yugoslav experience to the present day, when many artistic and institutional discussions focus specifically on the notion of the commons. In an age of global communications, it is essential that we act –​and examine current ideas –​from a position of local experience and knowledge; for this reason, too, we must move beyond

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debates that either demonize the Yugoslav past or nostalgically glorify it. Today, at a time of extreme individualism and atomization, when political and social ties are breaking down and falling apart, the question of the commons is all the more urgent. Through the project The Heritage of 1989, then, we look at the Yugoslav experience of the commons, and offer it for the examination of the wider international public, at a time when the state, the society, and the natural environment are in jeopardy and the world faces both a refugee crisis and impending ecological disaster. At the same time, we put forward a way of addressing the heritage of the social experience that is neither demonizing nor nostalgic, an approach we might most easily call “critical revisiting”. And to do this we have used the format of re-​enactment.8 In this ideal projection of Yugoslav Bratstvo i Jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity), the ideology of the commons was not resurrected to override difference but rather to re-​present the experience of solidarity. In these instances, friendship was not confined to an exercise in polite assurance, but elevated as a political agent and a driver of artistic collaborations in Eastern Europe. Victor Misiano, who was active in these events, stressed the discovery of commonality among people that were previously isolated from each other: This happened because friendly ties, being at the basis of the alternative communities of the communist past, played a constituent role also in the hard circumstances of the post-​communist transition. But at the same time, friendship was here comprehended as an up-​to-​date universal value, as an alternative model of globalization. Still, there was a certain ambiguity in that comprehension: very often friendship was seen not as a substantial condition of the artistic practice, but rather as a substitutional one. Symptomatic of this were even the terms proposed at the time:  “institutionalization of friendship” or “NSK state” for instance. It seems that the art world in transitional countries (sometimes unconsciously) conceived also friendship as something transitional, which would have to be substituted with real institutions and a real state in the near future. And in fact, when that future came, the Eastern art world easily put friendship aside. It took time and a deep immersion in the institutional condition to realize that friendship is a value in itself and a primary condition of art life. The generative power of friendship can be seen in desire, but also –​and there is a lot of confirmation for that –​in trauma. If Augustine of Hippo was claiming for a “Friendship in God”, we can talk today about “Friendship in trauma”.9 Zdenka Badovinac has also observed that the context of sociality and solidarity in L’Internationale has allowed the lowering of old defensive habits and encouraged a more creative spirit of openness:

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I have always taken pride in the fact that I do not compromise and that my curatorial vision was very focused on achieving a specific goal. This has tended to be formed in a context in which I was always vigilant towards possible dangers and lacked a strong sense of security. But in the context of L’Internationale I feel strong solidarity with my peers, and paradoxically this has enabled me to go deeper into my projects. By becoming tolerant it is not that I have become more permissive and simply opened myself up to a wider range of possibilities, but rather I have found a sense of acknowledgement and sense of mutual trust that gives me confidence to pursue an idea further without the fear of competition or threat.10 The bonds of friendship are usually most vivid in terms of a form of solidarity defined by sharing a common enemy. However, there are also different “relations of solidarity that are established in the course of flight –​by necessity of working together to invent opportunities that up until now had not been computed” (Virno 1996: 2014). By bringing forward the idea of friendship that is forged “in flight” there is an opportunity to de-​objectify the other, a need to recognize that others have qualities that cannot be reduced to things. Marcelo Exposito, a close collaborator with Borja-​Villel, also described the attractive pull of friendship, as a bristling form of openness that enables parrhesia:11 The role of pleasure and new politics of everyday life gives emphasis to practical knowledge as the formation of places of discussion and sociality. Every new movement must go beyond the holding of meetings in old political and economic fora, these events need to happen in places you want to be! Politics grows by incorporation, therefore there must be a critical awareness of what is outside and also attention to the process of self empowerment from the inside. A purely rational and critical evaluation of the condition will only clarify the misery, we also need to see how we can create a space for change. In these creative spaces, there is both the pleasure of experiencing hope, of projecting joy in solidarity with others, but also a conjunction with others who are different, in this chain of connection with different struggles there is also the pleasure of desire, and the awareness that no problem is individual. It is a process of confluence, more than a coalition, an opening of space for those who are not normally apart to form a common part.12 Borja-​Villel concurs with his friend, and goes even further as he claims that it is not “possible to propose any kind of social change other than through the conception of new forms of sociality” (2017a:  17). Friendship is thus more than a private experience of support, intimacy, and love. It is also part of the social experience through which an identity is constituted and critical thought is realized. Conviviality is not without antagonism. It does not aim for cosy consensus. That would be bereft of the differentiating energy

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needed for criticality and creativity. Without the combined allure of desire and the grit of antagonism conviviality becomes a duty and a chore –​a boring commitment that unites but ultimately chokes the group. In short, the process of “becoming-​common” is neither spontaneous nor natural, but, as Raunig argues, the instituting of the common needs to be seen as a “constant production of the common” (2013: 170).

Working groups Beyond the regular director’s meetings there must be additional trans-​ national deliberative forums. For, as Marcelo Exposito pointed out, the point of the confederation is to distribute power; “it is a summing up to multiply”.13 Curatorial and artistic teams now operate as “working groups” for exchanging information, developing projects as engaging with constituents and other activist groups. The working groups seem to operate adjacent to rather than under the command of the board of directors. Adela Zeleznik claims that they have high levels of autonomy, deploying a variety of online communicative platforms between the face-​to-​face meetings so that they can find ways to “keep talking until agreements are found”.14 As is evident in the name L’Internationale, socialist ideals have informed the modes of coming together. The nomenclature for the space of gathering has yet to be defined, but it appears that the principle of a soviet, whose etymology is derived from the idea of a council and notions of togetherness, is close (De Baere, Ayas & Schafhausen 2017: 4). In an atmosphere where criticality and dissent are valourized, consensus can appear like comic relief. Charles Esche is even prepared to be open to disagreeing with a position he had previously “agreed upon”. There appears to be a greater commitment to the value of testing and challenging ideas than the demand to follow predetermined codes and authority figures: One satisfying aspect is to see how the collaboration between our organisations start to affect how people see themselves and who they see as colleagues. It’s a slow process but we bring all the key staff from curating, mediation and productions together once a year as well as have bilateral collaborations. That begins to build a community that is more than an organisational hierarchy […] I  think if you constitutionalise it then there is a danger that you become one institution.15 All this sounds wonderfully affirmative, but can a confederation survive without formal rules on the right to representation, avenues for appeal, and a singular responsible body? At present there is a rotating figurehead as chairman of the directors. However, the directors insist that this position is purely symbolic and the only role that this person performs is to provide the final sign-​offs on grants and projects. At present, the individual members

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have their own respective governing systems for internal matters, but the collaborative projects have not been developed within an overriding field of jurisdiction. There is a prevailing optimism that an organic approach towards decision-​making will be just and creative. Throughout the time I conducted my interviews with the directors, curators, and project officers as well as the artists and constituents, such as Red Conceptualimos del Sur,16 that have long-​ standing connections with L’Internationale, it was apparent that the lack of formal governance procedures and the relative absence of sectarian interests was perceived as a powerful stimulus to creative production. Similarly, in the five-​year programme “The Uses of Art” that involved partners from across L’Internationale there was testament to not just a diversity of voices but also a shift in perspectives. Across a number of exhibitions, and documented in a comprehensive book, there is evidence of an approach that not only offers an alternative reading of the recent past but also addresses key questions from a localized perspective and profile “microhistories” (Aikens et al. 2018: 13). Developing a dialogue between the particular historical developments in specific places and the wider societal changes required a commitment to the plurality of narratives and a capacity to explore affinities, and it was notable that the curatorial and editorial leadership was distributed across different levels. When I interviewed the curators Nick Aiken, Nav Haq, and Teresa Grandas, no one called for more transparency over its deliberations or suggested that the directors of L’Internationale conduct themselves like the members in the private conclaves of the European Commission. There was a tolerance of and determined care to preserve the spaces of collaboration that occurred at the margins of institutional life. However, the commitment to social cooperation and the openness to a variety of voices presupposes a high level of shared expertise and tacit knowledge. There is acceptance that rules are not static, but this does not mean that anything goes. On the contrary, it puts greater emphasis on all the members being open to robust argumentative practices. In the absence of fixed norms, distinct areas of jurisdiction, terms of delegation, and prescribed avenues of appeal there is more play in rhetoric and persuasiveness. Conflicting interpretations and differing perspectives need more time to be grasped and reconciled. New ideas and modest proposals must go through a process of clarification and validation. Hence, the spaces for negotiation in a confederation need to be elastic in time and language. They require a plastic sensitivity to expressions of possibility that have not yet been credentialized. The directors of L’Internationale, like experts in general, tend to deny their agency. They would prefer to see change as being driven by the people with whom they have surrounded themselves. There is a style of leadership that would see itself as being part of the coming-​into-​being of creative practice, and “the letting-​be of public space through inaction” (De Baere, Ayas, & Schafhausen 2017: 4). However, for all this reticence towards authority, there needs to be greater clarity over the procedure by which knowledge and power resonate with each other. In particular, the fundamental

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tension in the confederation, the sovereignty of partner organizations and the commitment to a common trans-​national institution, may produce an interplay between pragmatism and idealism, yielding both constraints on sectarian interests and opportunities for collective aspirations, but the confederation itself cannot endure unless there is an acceptance of shared codes and values. It also requires a commitment to dedicate time and attention. Beyond the enthusiasm for commencing a grand and idealistic venture, there needs to be sustained effort to meet. Invention does not complete itself at the point of the beginning. On the contrary, a confederation is built from the ongoing and dialectical pattern of negotiation –​between autonomy and cooperation, as well as a complex cultural and ethical grammar. To paraphrase Michel Foucault, we could claim that L’Internationale does not possess a predetermined form of collaboration but transpires through collaborative ventures that are akin to the formless nature of friendship (Foucault 1997: 136). Hence, to consolidate the founding spirit of friendship and the pervading atmosphere of collegiality, the confederation could benefit from a more reflexive understanding of conviviality. Conviviality and governance are rarely articulated in tandem. Conviviality has the association of desirous openness. By contrast, governance assumes a sclerotic and reactionary force of containment. The affective lifeworld of conviviality is usually welcomed as background atmosphere that may be conducive to good governance, but it is rarely seen as part of the regulative fibre of an institution. In short, the experience of conviviality is normally thought of as something outside the function of governance; it is brought into the institution by informal means. Or put the other way around, when we think of governance, we are usually stepping out of the affective and sensory world and seeking to bring conviviality into line. Governance is, in this sense, not just the disciplining of conviviality, but also the process by which its wild outbursts are then broken down into manageable and acceptable components. In the conventional wisdom of corporate management, good governance is taken to be a process of identification, extraction, and instrumentalization of ideas that transpire in convivial situations. In a more paranoid modality, there is also the fear that unbounded conviviality would degenerate into chaos. If this approach were adopted in L’Internationale, it would mean that any new proposal developed by the working groups must compete with the already crowded agenda within the partner organization, then channel up to gain the support of the Board of Directors, and finally trickle out to gain the trust of the constituents.17 Let us think of another interpellation of conviviality and governance. We can begin with a kind of sideways step, whereby governance is not tasked with extraction and harnessing of conviviality, but as a process that takes its own shape through conviviality. It is not necessarily a code that is developed through the distillation of experiences and then projected to all future scenarios, but as the sense of an aesthetic-​ethical balance that is formed in

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the situation of collaboration. This sense of balance would require both a rear view of its footprints, and a capacity to project where the body of conviviality is heading. This means seeing where one has stepped with the intent of not only recalling what happened but also aiming to discern where it is heading. This metaphor of a dual perspective, whereby one must look backwards and project forward while also being attached to the body, is rather awkward. It may appear to be twisting the body in competing directions, and yet suggesting that the collective body develops a form of awareness that harbours an outward conviviality and an internal governance. Yet, we often take on such contradictions in our stride. Conviviality is always constituted by a surplus of perspectives: accommodating both the delirious dispersal of the heart and the cautious calculations of the mind. Norms and feelings may pull and push each other like competing forces, but to impose a fixed hierarchy, like a dress over the body, is to inhibit the very energy of encounters. Thus, conviviality should no longer be confined to a warm and fuzzy background, or be suspected of invariably tending towards chaos, but addressed as the essential process in the formation of what Hardt and Negri called the “multitude” (2004). To interpellate this conviviality we are not summoning a body into action, or even awakening dormant parts, but calling forth another kind of nexus between governance and sociality. In this nexus, conviviality is neither harvested nor harnessed, as if it were an already unified entity, and governance is not confined to either an opportunistic exploitation or a pietistic duty towards the other. Rather, both are drawn forth from the clustering of multiplicity. Understanding that sociality is not merely the “soft” background or a secondary benefit, breaks the association of institutions with cold containers, and opens a space for the entry of the community that Nancy predicts is “lying in wait”. In these emergent spaces “sociality is not a fusion or exclusion, but a communication in which space and time are materialized and community is located in the interstices of mutual exposure, in the in-​ between space of co-​appearance” (Nancy 1991: 69). Without a surplus in sociality, institutional viability is short-​lived. If the governance of L’Internationale is to proceed under the heading of “coming together to do what cannot be done alone”, then it can neither confine itself to internal reforms limited to admitting a select group of others nor pretend that it is part of a visible revolutionary alternative. To pursue its agenda of negotiating the complexities of mobility and address the plurality of histories, it must move closer to Chantal Mouffe’s proposal of a new universalism in which she asserts that the status of difference is neither the obstacle to political unity nor a sign of lacking social connectivity.18 Difference, Mouffe argues, is an irreducible feature of the social, and the basis of communication. Therefore, the process of coming together should never gloss differences. On the contrary, it will require a new way of imagining connection along a horizontal plane rather than a vertical hierarchy. Gerald Raunig has described this process as “Becoming-​common” (2013: 169). “Becoming-​common” is therefore

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not a matter of agglomeration or convergence, but moves as a different kind of totality –​an assemblage of localized, heterogeneous improvisations.

Trans-​n ational assemblages The difference between a network and a confederation highlights the need for L’Internationale to articulate pathways for distributing the responsibility amongst partners and the formation of new forms of cultural production. Whether the idea of being in a network activates more flow or inspires cynical and pragmatic interaction is a question that the members of L’Internationale also need to address in a more explicit manner. There are some obvious material benefits from a confederation. It widens the pool from which artists are identified, as well as extends the collections, archives, and communication systems. However, it does not automatically produce new forms of knowledge. Bart De Baere’s adoption of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “ensemble” provides a useful starting point for not only rethinking the museum’s internal mode of representation, but it also serves as a metaphor for trans-​institutional collaboration. Rather than focusing on the object and directing our attention to how “it” speaks, De Baere used the concept of ensemble so that heterogeneous elements could be distributed along lines “such that a segment of one always forms a relay with a segment of the other, slips into, introduces itself into the other” (Deleuze & Guattari 1998: 87). In an assemblage, cultural value is neither predetermined as a fixed essence nor subjected to a market evaluation. It is “enunciated” as it comes into a relation with the value of other objects or ideas. Bojana Piskur pointed out that the efforts to harmonize the sharing of information and artworks from their respective collections were not as important as the intellectual exchange generated by the confederation: “The key to making the archive more accessible across L’Internationale is the interpersonal sharing of knowledge rather than the development of meta-​data. It is more about sharpening the access points than having a single database”.19 Ozge Ersoy, a writer and collaborator with SALT, calls this process “brain sharing rather than brain storming”.20 A confederation could provide an alternative structure for organizing trans-​ national and trans-​institutional collaborations. There is a growing recognition by the members to experiment in cultural production through a relational process that is formed in a series of specific cultural contexts. The context in which L’Internationale operates in is at best vague and contradictory. It neither conforms to a national imaginary nor fits neatly into any globalizing paradigm. While L’Internationale is based in the geopolitical landscape of the European Union, it is caught between formal disaggregation and the informal groundswell for change from below. The nexus between conviviality and governance is a reminder that the work of keeping an institution together cannot be done in either a formal constitution or an informal network alone.

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In the latter parts of this book I  will open up the relationship between constituents and institutional governance. I will argue that the work of the collective imagination finds its forms in something that spills beyond the established institutions. Real production is not located in an individual; rather, it is accomplished in a context of sociality and conviviality of the commons. In the context of the commons governance does not contain the labour of the other constituents; it does not extract their energy in order to secure its own footings and extend its reach in the real world; it does not translate the insights of the other constituents back into the ordered codes, standardized procedures, and structured syntax of institutional success stories (Harney & Moten 2013: 80). To do so would preserve the casing of the impulse but drain the juices. For instance, it can adopt the corporatized rhetoric of globalized culture to lure tourism, or it can use the concept of cosmopolitanism to speak to the occluded sensorium and cosmologies that are marginalized in the North.21 In its optimum expression L’Internationale is both a trans-​ national and a trans-​institutional collaborative venture, but it is also capable of igniting something else that eludes the capture of a gridded network. The form and identity of this “something else” is complex and contradictory. It might be clear in a negative sense in that it is expressive of its non-​state paradigm and yet, the self-​organizational principles of democratic confederalism may also yield new hybrid identifications that have come from the other side of the institution’s archive. The utopian and the real are not exterior to each other. The former may be seen as the yearning to extend the latter, or as a point of indignation against the insufficiency of present options. What is real is never fixed. It always shifts and stretches. People can grasp the possible, but they can also make it anew as they reach for the impossible. At the beginning of this chapter I gave priority to the plurality of voices that come forth in the making of a confederation. I distinguished the multiplicity of voices from a singular command. It is also worth recalling that Marx, in his writings on the Paris Commune of 1871, distinguished between a “political” and a “social revolution”. A  political revolution is directed towards the hardware  –​the instruments and apparatus  –​of power. Marx warned that the conquest of the state machinery and resources will never be secure unless there is also a wider process of social cooperation –​a revolution in the software. A social revolution is not won by simply controlling the tools for disseminating information. On the contrary, it presupposes what Raunig calls a “machinic social”. It relies on the prior and expansive form of sociality, an inventive mode of assembly and spirit of cooperation that precedes and exceeds the “radars of the apparatuses” (Raunig 2017:  5). The social revolution is composed of multiple voices. It has a music of its own rather than being led by the beat of a command system. In a globalizing world, where the instruments for communication are increasingly homogenized, it is all the more vital that we tune into the voices that are shaping the spaces of sociality.

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The building of a new trans-​institutional collective structure, a kind of horizontal sociality that is open to the multiplicity of voices, has become one of the core tasks of L’Internationale. The friendship network that was vital for the foundation of L’Internationale is now spreading horizontally among the staff in the different institutions. This is resulting in not just a sharing of knowledge but also the practical handling of tasks by fellow members.22 Zdenka Badovinac also adds: To understand NSK as a community we need a wider perspective:  we need to situate this artistic collective of over twenty members within the collective habitus of the alternative cultural and civil society in the 1980s Slovenia. A  number of NSK projects attempted to define a different understanding of community and of the commons by breaking away from the predominant understanding of community based on national identity, starting with the very name of the collective. This name, Neue Slowenische Kunst, New Slovenian Art, makes its point by means of a paradox:  NSK developed a new national art under a German name  –​ German being a hegemonic language which dominated the territory of present-​day Slovenia for a thousand years.23 This commitment towards building an apparatus for communication is vital in a globalizing world. As noted by Borut Vogelnik and Roman Uranjek, two artists in the Slovenian collective IRWIN, discovering where your peers exist, and what your neighbours are doing, is now an artistic necessity rather than just a secondary subject of critical curiosity: Our projects that involved creating embassies were based on the principle of building a platform for meeting allies and developing a communication apparatus. L’Internationale is operating on a much bigger scale and their aim is also to make visible a process of communication that is necessary in an interconnected world. In this world collaboration is not only important and interesting, it is essential for survival. For what is missing in a globalizing world is a system of communication between equals. Such an apparatus does not already exist, it is not just found in say adopting English as the mutually convenient second language of the international art world. On the contrary, a communicative apparatus that treats people as equals has to be discovered. It will take time to define key terms, a shared vocabulary and propose standards for communication. These steps are not to be taken for granted as if they are mere means to the more valuable outcome or projects. These steps are the basis of an

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apparatus for communication, and without them one that can never build trust and intimacy, and it will never be possible for people to be equals.24 Globalization and cosmopolitanism do not go hand in hand either on the worldly ground or in high theory. In the most banal uses of globalization the world is treated as a flat square surface upon which everything is brought closer together and governed by a common set of rules –​a network in the reductive sense of the word. Globalization has an integrative dynamic, but a globe without a complex “ecology of practices” (Stengers 2011) would not be a world. A world is more than a surface upon which human action occurs. Therefore, the process of globalization is not simply the “closing in” of distant forces and “coordination between” disparate elements that are dispersed across the global network. The worldly thought process and radical encounter with the other is the way we open the sensorium and cultivate the occluded cosmologies. The cosmos in cosmopolitanism cannot be reduced to the flat space of the globe in globalization. From the pluriversal outlook of L’Internationale there is neither a singular cosmos nor a gridded globe. There is instead the constant production of heterocosmoi.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Email correspondence with Bart De Baere, 20 May 2019. Ferran Berenblit, interview, Barcelona, 6 September 2016. Manuel Borja-​Villel, interview, Madrid, 1 September 2016. Ferran Berenblit, interview, Barcelona, 6 September 2016. Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. Bart De Baere, interview, Antwerp, 12 September 2016. Bojana Piskur, interview, Ljubljana, 29 August 2016. Email correspondence with Zdenka Badovinac, 24 April 2017. Cited in correspondence with Zdenka Badovinac. Zdenka Badonivic, interview, Ljubljana, 28 August 2016. Bart De Baere has also expressed a robust view on living with difference: The idea of interest in and solidarity with people from different parts of the world has been central to my work since my formative years working alongside Jan Hoet. In particular, I believe in the possibilities that arise from weak links, and not from totalizing abstractions. The latter produce simplified forms of unity, whereas in weak links there is complexity. This allows for a greater variation of human types and cultural expressions. For instance, in a village you would need to learn to live with both the annoying and charming neighbours, learn to tolerate selfish people, while admiring the strengths of others. Conviviality comes from living with this difference. This ordinary sociality, everyday exchange is like the plaster in a building, it is what keeps everything together, it is the matter that flows in all encounters and keeps things going. (Bart De Baere, interview, Antwerp, 13 September 2016)

66  Conviviality as governance 11 Parrhesia, or speaking truth to power, is an ancient Greek concept that is associated with Socrates. It is also the organizing principle for the final lectures delivered by Michel Foucault on the function of philosophy in politics and friendship. It is often taken as an expression of the unwavering and uncontestable commitment to truth, and the willingness of a philosopher to pursue the logic of thought to its ultimate goal, irrespective of the consequences. Truth is not qualified by fear or favours. The exemplary moment of parrhesia is the disclosure of truth in the presence of a force that is already disposed towards another direction. Here parrhesia produces a conflict of views and the need to decide. The most common instances of parrhesia are in the conversations between friends. 12 Marcelo Exposito, interview, Madrid, 3 September 2016. 13 Marcelo Exposito, interview, Madrid, 3 September 2016. 14 Adela Zeleznik, interview, Ljubljana, 30 August 2016. According to Sonya Lopez, the slogan of the working groups is: “To tell the stories from the past in the present and to imagine a new future”. Sonya Lopez, interview, Barcelona, 7 September 2016. 15 Charles Esche interview, Eindhoven, 16 September 2016. 16 Red de Conceptualismos del Sur (Network of Conceptualisms of the South) was founded in 2007 by a group of researchers and artists that met at a conference in MACBA. The collective has continued with an ongoing partnership with the Reina Sofia since 2008. Their aim is to document the work of Latin American critical artistic practices since the 1960s. However, rather than simply relocating the documents to institutional archives, they seek to preserve, socialize, and reactivate the artistic archives in their original location, and also use the institutional resources to digitize and disseminate the archives in a sustainable, free, and open-​ access environment. See https://​redcsur.net/​en/​ (accessed 2 February 2019). On the relationship between Reina Sofia and Red de Conceptualismos del Sur, see also the essay by Manuel Borja-​Villel in Fernanda Carvajal, Paulina Varas, and Jaime Vindel (editors), Archivo Cada. Astucias y Potencias de lo común (Santiago de Chile: Ocho Libro, 2019). 17 Sonya Lopez and Teresa Grandas, interview, Barcelona, 7 September 2016. 18 This is not a matter of socialist revolution. I think that today the right strategy for the European Left is that of a radical reformism proceeding through a war of position, forcing reforms as far forward as possible. Without doubt that would involve ruptures, but it would be gradual, because we can’t anticipate everything in advance and everything would also depend on the international conjunction. I think that’s what Iglesias is proposing with his project of a “fourth social democracy”. That does not mean throwing the social-​democratic project out with the bathwater, but instead demands a return to a truly radical social democracy. (Chantal Mouffe, “A Salutary Shock?” 27 June 2016. www.versobooks.com/​ blogs/​2732-​a-​salutary-​shock-​chantal-​mouffe-​on-​brexit-​and-​the-​spanish-​elections, accessed 20 August 2017) 19 Bojana Piskur, interview, Ljubljana, 30 August, 2016. 20 Ozge Ersoy, interview, Istanbul, 25 August 2016. 21 I think the real mapping ought to happen along couples like system/​basics, rather than north/​south. There is a risk that “the north” appropriated by “the south” by the old exoticisms talks, now both will become impoverished clichés once again

Conviviality as governance  67 in a different way. I  can tell you many “north” stories that fit only in “south” frameworks. (Email correspondence with Bart De Baere, 22 September 2017) 2 2 Adela Zeleznik, interview, Lubljana, 29 August 2016. 23 Email correspondence with Zdenka Badovinac, 9 September 2019. 24 Borut Vogelnik and Roman Uranjek, interview, Lubljana, 28 August 2016.

Chapter 4

Heterocosmoi

In 1967 (1986), the French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered a lecture to a group of architects where he introduced the term “heterotopias” to refer to urban sites that constituted states of otherness: regions that either eluded the established norms or deviated from the regulative functions of society. With examples that ranged from brothels, to gardens, to asylums, to hospitals, to prisons, to saunas, Foucault claimed that these sites could simultaneously serve as containers for the underside of the social imaginary, as well as breathing spaces for the emergence of strange juxtapositions. In more metaphoric terms Foucault also elaborated the idea of heterotopia through the paradoxical qualities of the mirror, insofar as it is the location in which an image of the world is captured, but it is also the point from which distortions proceed. Similarly, heterotopias were compared to a boat, as it is both a physical vessel and a mental abstraction that allows the subject to flee. Unlike utopias, which are fictive sites that exist purely in the interior imagination of the subject, and retrotopias, which are aggressive collective reactions of retreat into an idealized past (Bauman 2017), Foucault argued that heterotopias are in essence real spaces in which imaginary possibilities are merged with practical functions. Although Foucault’s lecture was not much more than a sketch, and the kernel of the idea is one that he only returned to sporadically (1998), it is nevertheless clear that the concept of heterotopia is part of his wider investigation into the “double” topology of the imagination. Foucault understood “other spaces” as a counterpoint to the theories of the imagination that situated the locus of creativity in the interior world of the subject. For Foucault, the work of the imagination does not reside purely inside the subject. On the contrary, it begins within the outside and doubles back onto the subject that is instituted in the process of subjectification. Heterotopia is thus most useful when it is grasped in the production of relations and the complex topology of the imaginary. Given that the organization of the imagination is the function of the museum, and that the evolution of the museum as an institution is caught up in the collective language of images and actions, then, it is worth bearing in mind whether the concept of heterotopia has purchase in the current museological discourse on aesthetics and politics.

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Towards the end of his career Foucault developed a nuanced account of the sociopolitical transformations that we now associate with neoliberalism. The concept heterotopia was never incorporated into this later work. Despite this uneven theoretical development, the concept became emblematic in museum studies (Belting 2001), announcing the function of the museum as the antithesis to the carceral institutions (Shapiro 2003), or elevating it as the site from which difference emerges (Lord 2006). Given that the historical conditions that made heterotopias possible have either shrunk, or been eviscerated, there is a risk of conflating actual institutional sites with the relations and apparatus “for making visible the working of the outside of thought” (Hetherington 2011: 464). The association of museums with the concept of heterotopia now appears nostalgic. Foucault’s outline of heterotopian sites is best seen as a transitional mapping, capturing many of the contradictions and ellipses in the urban formations that appeared amidst the ruins of the industrial city. For instance, between the 1960s and the 1980s artists were alert to the potential reuse of abandoned spaces. Studios and galleries sprouted in semi-​derelict lofts and empty warehouses. However, in a very short period of time these very sites have been revalued as prized heritage destinations and designated as the preferred loci for corporate hipsters. The other spaces that produced an ecology for heterotopias are no longer anywhere to be found in gentrified London and downtown New York. Late capitalism is proceeding at such a pace that it engulfs its own periphery and absorbs the territories of difference. This has direct implications for the way the institutions of art can grow in size and expand to address new needs. Hence, the choice is not between museums that are generic nodes of globality, or niche spaces for celebrating local difference. This binary option is both wrong and untenable. What is notable is that the spaces for contemporary art have been increasingly subject to a process of modularization. In order to capture private sponsorship and maximize public attendance, museums have been branded by “iconic” architects, or become depots for imported exhibitions that have the proven capacity to achieve mass appeal. Whether it is in the attempt to emulate the Bilbao effect or to import a pre-​packaged exhibition on French masters, the result resembles a modularization of contemporary culture. Across the spectrum of museums and art institutions there is greater pressure to prove the worthiness of public investment, to integrate the spectacular and the commercial, and to standardize knowledge through the new “pedagogy of feeling” (Witcomb 2015). Almost 20 years ago Rosalind Krauss complained that some galleries were being designed so that the euphoric experience was not directed towards the art but arose from the encounter of the building (Krauss: 1990). To the directors who followed the path of Thomas Krens, this complaint may now seem like a compliment. Other spacings of time have to be made anew. Against this colonizing drive to commodify civic spaces and instrumentalize affective labour, there

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is a push to put forward a different “spacing of time”, or at least allow the museum to catch up with the spacing of time in the everyday and overcome the classic Cartesian representational framework (Baere 1994:  62). Furthermore, I will argue that the concept of the heterocosmoi is more suited to the context of the contemporary museum. It can be used to connect the existence of the commons –​whether it is through the identification of collective intelligence or the organization of social and natural wealth –​with the resistance to capitalism’s effort to monetize, the state’s regulative tendencies, and the communitarian’s aim to territorialize the commons. These hegemonic forces justify the policing of the commons on the ground that the multitude lacks administrative resources and distributive tools. However, in this effort to fence off, extract, and control the commons, they also admit its significance (Harney & Moten 2013: xx). In the first instance, as Gerald Raunig notes in relation to museum of the commons, this is a timely prompt for the resistance to the logic of the modular: The point is to reorganize remainders of the civil public sphere and of society conceived as social democratic, in order to redirect the manifold currents of the modulating institutions and transform the public into the common. (2013: 172) To keep open the exploration of spaces of cultural production, in both the personal imaginary and through social relations, we need, as Raunig suggests, a political project which reorders the ways of living and opens the space for “the aesthetic truth of the heterocosmos which is an immanent truth in its own right” (2016:  9). It is from this perspective that heterocosmoi is useful as a concept for thinking through the capacity of L’Internationale to activate new dispositifs, the apparatus for making otherness visible.

Heterocosmoi as spaces of cultural production Today, the work of art exists more and more beyond the object and through the relations that transpire from social encounters. To speak with the work of art is to engage in the multiple and unending process of making worlds through sociality. From this starting point I  adopt the concept of heterocosmoi to address both the general process of instituting new imaginaries in everyday life, and the particular way artists make worlds, not necessarily from within their own idiosyncratic world “but in the world between them and the spectator” (de Baere 1994:  59). By stressing the plurality of “cosmoi”, and the radical difference of “hetero”, there is also an opportunity to clarify the spaces of the commons and clear away any misconception that this concept is just a ruse to retreat into a romantic vision.

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Figure 4.1 Huseyin Bahri Alptekin:  Self Heterotopia, Catching Up with Self, 1997–​2007. Credit Line:  Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Photograph: Peter Cox.

In the history of aesthetics, heterocosmos began as a Renaissance concept for addressing the capacity of a work of art to constitute a cosmos. This concept drew on the religious idea of the icon as a divine production and set up the romantic vision of the artist as creator. Hence, art was seen as the product of creation and not a mere “manufacture” (Abrams 1971). Alexander Baumgarten (Aesthetica, 1750), who pioneered the reappraisal of aesthetics in philosophy, also cautioned against the misconceptions that could follow from a heterocosmic perspective. Baumgarten discussed the scope of the imagination and its capacity to bring together different elements and thereby compose figmenta. Such figmenta were, however, already bound by a framework that distinguished between figmenta vera –​that revealed the pre-​existence of a singular order of the elements and the internal coherence of the world –​and figmenta heterocosmica  –​that construed an order that was only possible in other worlds. For Baumgarten, figmenta heterocosmica were not only useless fantasies that bore no connection to the world we experienced, but they also represented the failure of art to register the harmonious system that was at the centre of classical thinking on the cosmos. Heterocosmos was thus heavily weighted as a negative term for the artistic effort that lacked grace and failed to order the particular elements in an artwork in line with the true structure of the cosmos. It referred to an artist’s vain effort to conjure an imaginary world that was neither subject to the laws

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of the world nor pitched in key with cosmic harmonics. Amongst writers like Baumgarten, and even the critic that was to herald the advent of the modern, Charles Baudelaire, there was an axiom that they believed perdured since antiquity –​art was a means for tuning into the cosmic order and trans-​ historical truths. The postmodern condition was fundamentally an expression of incredulity towards this grand narrative (Lyotard 1979). However, at the margins of Homeric literature, and at the core of the Stoic philosophy, is a more complex and not so easily disposable vision of the cosmos. Homer used the term “cosmos” to refer to the activity of embellishing a speech, adorning the body, and rearranging a space. Cosmos was a practical a term for the activity of making a space attractive, the shaping of appearances to beckon the other, or for the use of words to create an atmosphere that induces a new order of acceptance. In its most exquisite conception, the human art of cosmetic adornment, and the order of the universe, were experienced as being in alignment. In Stoic philosophy, the term cosmos also referred to a sphere that separated the earth from the boundless universe. The cosmos was a sphere in which the divine resided, and also the source of logos. However, the Stoics visualized the force of the sphere through the luminous and thrusting metaphor of “creative fire”. Imagining the cosmos as a sphere that is propelled by “creative fire” helps us rethink the scope and flow of thought. Logos was not just reason, but it also included the sensory apprehension of the truth. For Baumgarten, the concept of the horizon and the capacity for aesthetics to produce a different kind of thinking were vital (Raunig 2016). The most important legacy that comes from Baumgarten’s work is his attempt to overcome the divide between sensuous and rational thinking. Aesthetics is therefore not just the philosophical discipline for thinking about beautiful things. More importantly, it is the activity of thinking differently. Beautiful thinking is creating distinctive orders that beckon us forth in a way that both precedes and exceeds the force of logic. We should extend this thinking through the adoption of the plural term “heterocosmoi” to address the world-​making activity of art that is free from the classicizing bounds of cosmic fidelity. It is a mode of practice that trains the imagination to visualize what Spivak defined as “planetary consciousness”, and performs the “uncoercive rearrangement of desire” (2011: 78). There is no singular and pre-​existing autonomous space for heterocosmoi. The point of heterocosmoi is not to identify the existence of alternative spaces that are zones of retreat or deviation, but to speak to the process of alternating between existing worlds and altering the framework for making a world. Thus, we now turn to face the scalar role of the imagination in the production of heterocosmoi on three levels, zooming from micro to the macro, the infinite small first move in a creative gesture as a complex interplay between the subjective interior and the external event, to the staging of exhibitions as an apparatus for making another space visible, and finally a brief acknowledgement of the spherical imagination.

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Heterocosmoi and world-​m aking If the work of the imagination operates in double topology, both outside and inside the subject, then how will L’Internationale activate the flow? At one level, the idea of heterocosmoi requires curators to be more precise about assumed knowledge on cultural background and global connections.1 As Teresa Grandas notes: “The working groups and seminars that L’Internationale hosts are mechanisms for testing ideas and developing shared knowledge. In these contexts I have to articulate my positions without taking for granted specific historical and political knowledge”.2 At another level, it also heightens the sceptical approach towards the dominant claims of progressive globalism that are “embedded in a ‘Eurocentric and colonial mindset’ ”,3 and the need to confront the complacent pockets of provincialism.4 A  number of the curators stressed that rethinking the parameters and lines of connections between different fields of cultural production has been the great challenge of L’Internationale: At the centre of its (the confederation) vision is the idea of permeability, and flow is multi-​directional, both between the partners and to all the publics. This can be seen in the feedback generated in the L’Internationale projects. For instance, in the 1980s project the curators agreed on certain topics and began doing research. This research was informed by shared values on political engagement and commitment to critical perspectives on contemporary issues. However, it also brought things to the surface and a distinct exhibition frame was developed in each context to hold it, and by joining these frames together we have a system of possible unexpected connections, a crippled system perhaps, but another possibility all the same, as opposed to multiple exhibitions simply held in proximity to each other. This exhibitionary formation can also be seen as a dispositif. It is not simply a matter of establishing links but also allowing the discontinuities to remain visible. This process of association is thus closer to Warburg’s idea of an image harbouring links to other images, even when the other images were formed in contexts that are remote to each other in time and place. And in more political terms, our aim is not produce soft ecstasies of the present. However, there is also a flow on effect in terms of how archives and collections are accessed, shared and incorporated. So the knowledge production spreads across and within the institutions. This horizontal flow is particularly evident in the conduct of the constituencies. As they take an idea they assert their agency and determine its trajectory. Thus as the 1980s or the NSK project travels to each location, it will not only be reframed by the curators, but through the engagement of the constituencies.5 Meric Oner, from SALT, also stressed the role of exchange in not only expanding the field but also “corrupting” the conventional association of a collection exhibition.

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A collection show is usually associated with a display of the institution’s purchases, demonstrating both a coherent curatorial vision, and a proprietorial demonstration of assets. However, at the Van Abbemuseum the collection show, now includes works from other partners in L’Internationale. The aim here was not simply to spread the scope of territory from which the Van Abbemuseum could draw on, as if each partner is now just a partner in a kind of neo-​colonial structure, but rather it presented the opportunity to include works which sharpen the connections and highlight the significance of the works that are featured in the exhibition. It was less a display of power and more of an opportunity for genuine exchange that heightens the strengths that had already been formed in the context of the Van Abbemuseum’s collection. Again the point of selecting from each other’s collection was not driven by an exhibitionary desire to highlight the scope or diversity of the collections, but to sharpen understanding of the existing works. The former strategy not only repeats a crude colonial gesture, but also reinscribes the modernist ideal of juxtaposition.6 The dual activity of zooming in to note the place of art, and zooming out to witness the flows of culture, opens the shutters to a new curatorial approach. Here we begin to see a new curatorial attention that is closer to an artistic sensibility that draws on a more fluid sense of place. Throughout Berger’s long career as a critic he rejected the simple idea that artists are either gifted with a divine spark or are beneficiaries of a deep pool of creativity. Imagination was neither controlled by a capricious deity nor confined to the interior of the subject. For Berger, the work of the imagination was a recurring struggle between the infinity of the cosmos and the emptiness of the void, but it was also part of a collective effort to give meaning to a particular place: Place is more than area. A  place surrounds something. A  place is the extension of a presence or the consequence of an action. A place is the opposite of an empty space. A  place is where an event has taken or is taking place. (2001: 28–​29) This idea of place as an active zone rather than a fixed unit or boundless sphere is comparable to the ideas proposed in sociology and cultural geography (de Certeau 1984). However, Berger is not simply making the point that the territory is an active force in the construction of spatial meaning and a dynamic partner in the poetics of everyday life. He is also seeking to explain how an artist can make an image leap out of its own specific context and fall into the groove of an alternate spatial system (Berger 1980: 80). This emphasis on art as a place-​making activity poses new curatorial challenges. The curator must recognize that the significance of place is not purely determined by formal

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rules, nor is it defined by decoding the cultural content that is embedded in the image. The movement from private to public information, or the oscillation between the specific identification and the general feeling of recognition, is a process that Berger returned to over and over in his art writing. More recently, in relation to the sense of place in painting, Berger repeated the observation that the experience of recognition is paradoxical: while it is not confined to the identification of overt physical markers, it also reproduces a palpable and alterior organizing point from which identification commences: The painter is continually trying to discover, to stumble upon, the place which will contain and surround his present act of painting. Ideally there should be as many places as there are paintings. The trouble is that a painting often fails to become a place. […] When a place is found it is found somewhere on the frontier between nature and art. It is like a hollow in the sand within which the frontier has been wiped out. The place of the painting begins in this hollow. Begins with a practice, with something being done by the hands, and the hands then seeking approval of the eye, until the whole body is involved in the hollow. (Berger 2001: 28–​29) Building on this account of the recognition of place, I would contend that heterocosmoi are shaped as poetic assemblages that claim their place in the real world. They are not extrapolations of existing entities, such as an emblem that represents an ethnic community or a national identity. The heterocosmoi of L’Internationale would offer little if there were simply an aggregation of representative spaces from within their confederation. Heterocosmoi are formations from the worlds that are formed between the constituents, and this instituting of new spaces has the potential to transform the meaning of context and liberate it from the prison-​house of nationalized geography where every member is supposed to be confined to their own exclusive locus. In this sense, it is akin to a transitive model that Nancy Adajania and Ranjit Hoskote defined as the “nth field”:  the as-​yet-​unspecified but foreseeable iterations arising from the feedback loops in transcultural mutuality (Adajania 2015). A  curatorial approach that is alert to the heterocosmoi is thus not just expanding the frameworks for developing cross-​cultural exhibitions but also rethinking the temporalities of history and the spaces of cultural production. For instance, Manuel Borja-​Villel noted that Principio Potosi, an exhibition curated for the Reina Sofia by the artists Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, and Max Jorge Hinderer, provided a radical point of entry into the idea of the modern. Rather than exploring the metropolitan relationship between the aesthetic forms of modernism and the locus of modernity, they started with Europe and working out from Courbet and Kant, they turned to the mining town of Potosi –​a primal scene in what Marx called primitive

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accumulation. Capitalism begins in this geopolitical region of colonial and then global exploitation. However, it is also a scene of complex visual communication. It is the contact zone between Western and indigenous religious iconographies. The result was not a simple imposition of Christian symbols or the abdication of indigenous ideas. On the contrary, it resulted in a syncretic mixture. Two further questions followed from these observations, how do you learn from the hybridity –​the coexistence of the different visual and cultural orders? And, what are the parallels to the present situation in the Middle East –​in terms of sites of primitive accumulation and the development of visual systems? These questions were vast and not fully answered in this project. However, it did force the curators to create a new dispositif. In order to break with the enlightenment view of the subject and linear historical progress, the identity of artworks was not named, the works from different periods were split across different levels of the building and also mixed together. The wall panels used a dense and convoluted language. In some ways this exhibition failed, but it also revealed some fundamental challenges about the subaltern condition.7 By redefining the point of entry, new relations are made possible. The Van Abbemuseum has also undertaken radical steps to transform the conditions of sociality and activate the apparatus of the museum for experimental research. Charles Esche admits that the impetus came from SALT –​a partner institution that had no collection and had already conducted important experiments on using archives. Our program called Deviant Practice was inspired by their initiatives to generate stories from their archives. As our focus shifts from object focused research to critically reflecting on the museum as an institution for generating stories, then the ideas and strategies for generating stories will also need to be refined and expanded.8 The lessons from SALT, the activist legacy from MACBA, and the experiments with the artist’s archive at Reina Sofia have all shed light not only on artistic programming but also on the extent to which the ambient modes of spectatorship are radically different from the viewpoints that prevailed in the modern museum. As stated earlier, the architecture and programming of exhibitions in the modern museum sought to conjure a luminous atmosphere that was conducive for grasping the autonomous truth of art. The use of neutral frames, sterile rooms, and linear passageways accentuated a linear mode attention to the uniqueness of an object and its precise place in the chronology of art history. It also tended to treat any discrepancy between authorial intention and public reception as interference, contamination, or ignorance that needed to

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be corrected. The new curatorial practices that are driven by “pedagogies of feeling” and respond to the ambient modes of spectatorship claim to be more open to the agency of the spectator. However, the old barriers that filter the influence of diverse cultural contexts and channel historical consciousness are not easily overcome. Heterocosmoi do not just appear on their own. On the one hand, the emancipated spectator has the power of association and dissociation (Rancière 2004), rather than confining their attention to “getting” the artist’s meaning. On the other hand, the institutions of art still have a responsibility to encourage other forms of curiosity, comparison, and translation –​to combine activism with art, academic analysis with artistic experimentation, lectures and performances, workshops and laboratories, or events that are “becoming common” and occur outside the institutional spaces.9 The traditional pedagogic and curatorial distinctions have collapsed. It is no longer so clear-​cut, as the curators handle everything inside the walls, and mediators do the rest –​the education programme and the engagement with public culture. Similarly, the agency of the spectator is neither channelled into pure judgement where beauty and universal truth are in symmetrical harmony, nor open-​ended relativism where one preference is as good as the next. By making visible the interplay between the individual and the collective intelligence, the museums of the commons also reconfigure the nexus between spectatorship and participation. In the final chapter I will argue that “distracted spectatorship” can no longer be seen as a problem that must be corrected by “disciplining” the subject back into the traditional modes of contemplative analysis. For now, I simply draw on the idea of heterocosmoi to remind us that the function of the museum is not to cling onto modes of spectatorship that confine the subject position into a one-​to-​one examination of the object. On the contrary, the museum must make visible, through its own apparatus, the relationship between the new tools of visuality and the contemporary modes of spectatorship. For instance, Ferran Barenblit noted that the collaboration with Eyal Weizman and the Forensic Architecture Group not only provided insight into the use of surveillance tools but also produced a different perspective on the possibilities for public intervention: Forensic have a working methodology that is very useful, and can provide lessons for both MACBA and L’Internationale. They start with the objects of destruction, such as the military uses of drones in a civilian landscape, rather than what architects normally do which is to impose a creation on a surface. They look at the corpses for evidence and try to map out a critical interpretation of the process of destruction. This perspective is useful if we are to seriously consider the pressure to map out the consequences of violence in contemporary society, but also for the wider issue of de-​growth, that is, social progress without economic growth, as well as think through the challenges of living in times of cultural complexity, where rival symbols are competing for attention. I think what is

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interesting in the Forensic model is that it goes beyond the representation and critique of an issue. It is not simply aiming to extend visibility or to expose an issue that is hidden, because in our context inequality and violence are already pornographically present. Making this more visible is not enough, it must go beyond an intervention in the Museum and into the everyday life.10

Is there too much world? If the concept of heterocosmoi directs us towards alternate scales and flows of poetic imagination that are responsible for “creating worlds” and “inventing new horizons” (Raunig 2015:  6), is there not a risk that it compounds the numbing sensation of overexposure and difference fatigue? While it offers a useful optic for making visible the relation to otherness, appreciating the imaginary interplay between subjective interior and objective exteriority, and dislodging the authority of a universal world picture, its propulsive force is also continuous with the voracious appetite for novelty in an art world. The surplus in the art world “has become so unwieldy” that, Zdenka Badovinac exclaims, “it is impossible to remember the names of all the artists, impossible to see all the important shows, know all the local histories, and read all the relevant theories”.11 How to make the worlds connect when there is already the experience of “too much world” (Aitkens 2014)? Rather than being exhausted by the manic pursuit of total connectedness, or overwhelmed by deafening noise, the artist Luc Deleu, who enjoys a long-​ term working relationship with Bart de Baere at M HKA, has argued that there is an opportunity to rethink the function of scale: There are two ways of thinking about scale: one in terms of the human body, and the other in terms of the earth as a whole. The earth is an orb. When we think of art and architecture these two scales should be fundamental. It is already there in our everyday life. The invention and production of our laptops have not come from a non-​place, the whole world is involved in the construction of this technology. So the question is how to think of the earth as a whole and the needs of a human when you are making art.12 This alternation between an embodied perspective and what Deleu (13 September 2016) calls the view of the earth as an orb, reintroduces the spherical cosmopolitan imagination. The cosmopolitan imaginary is, as I  have argued, not to be confused with a vision that flattens the world as it reduces all differences and imposes a universal standard. It is better envisaged as a process of self-​problematization and critical invention that occurs through the encounter with the other (Papastergiadis 2012). The function of the imagination is thus not to confined to serving as a mine from which alternate

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images of reality can be excavated, but rather it operates in a more complex topology. It is enfolded in the present and yet it provides a way to flee. It is, to repeat Foucault’s metaphors, both mirror and boat. It functions as a “practice, in the horizon of which, within the horizon of which there is a different world” (Raunig 2016: 10). The work of the imagination as an instituting practice, as opposed to the politics of extraction and representation that Borja-​ Villel alluded to in the Principio Potosi exhibition, takes us to the expanded meaning of heterocosmoi. Rather than offer an aesthetic retreat, the point of heterocosmoi is to transform this world by remaking the aesthetic boundaries of spacing time in the actual world. Heterocosmoi is the interpellation that interrupts this world and is a summoning of an already emergent world. Heterocosmoi is only possible if the agency of the spectator is raised from passive viewer to an active participant, who not only selects from the binary options of matrix culture but also claims the opportunity for collaboration in the production of a third space. Radical museology has tended to suggest that museums can serve as overt sites for struggle. This might be overstating things. What is more evident in the complex topology of museum space is that they are not totalizing institutions that control everything that they contain. The first phase of collaboration and experimentation in L’Internationale has produced a massive archive of knowledge. Much of it is freely available on its website. However, we have seen that radical projects also require radical models of governance. Without a commitment to redistribute power, the momentum of good intentions fades and utopianism crashes on the rocks

Figure 4.2 Exhibition view. The Potosi Principle. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2010. Photo by Joaquin Cortes and Roman Lores.

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of rivalry. In the following chapter, we will explore how L’Internationale is not only aiming to break free from both nineteenth-​century teleologies that organized the progressive march of art historical time, and the global tendency to modularize culture, but also to propel the concept of heterocosmoi into the practice of the constituents.

Notes 1 An example of this approach can be found in the joint exhibition between MACBA and the Van Abbemuseum. According to Teresa Grandas, our focus was on Video Nou. It sought to bridge the activism from civil society and the process of democratization in the institutions. However, it was also a period in which the institutions absorbed much of activism and almost made it disappear. This process of moving in and out of a specific context also informed the development of an exhibition for MACBA: “Hard Gelatine”: It is a metaphor about the Spanish situation during the ’80s:  the soft official narratives and the hard situation. Again I will focus on the Spanish context and the extent to which this promise of democratization was not realized by the institutional processes, and while it neutralized some movements, it also caused much frustration and resentment. It was out of these tensions that the new movements emerged in the 2000s. (Teresa Grandas, interview, Barcelona, 7 September 2016) In a similar spirit, Yeliz Selvi also noted the feedback between performers such as Simone Forti that were invited by the constituents to public programmes and workshops at SALT, and their subsequent incorporation in L’Internationale exhibitions (Yeliz Selvi, interview, Istanbul, 25 August 2016). 2 Teresa Grandas, interview, Barcelona, 7 September 2016. 3 Meric Oner, interview, Istanbul, 26 August 2016. 4 Anders Kreuger observed that the Antwerp audiences favored the representation of local artist over even Belgian artists like Chantal Ackerman. We live in, as Rem Koolhaas called it, “Euro Core”, where the dense populated and inter-​linked urban networks, as well as patterns of mobility and historical ties, have created cultural flows that transcend the boundaries of North-​West Europe. However, there is in each city a pocket of provincialism. (Anders Kreuger, Interview, Antwerp, 13 September 2016) The Belgian cultural sociologist Pascal Gielen also stressed the limited impact of the projects that have been developed under the banner of L’Internationale: At the moment I can’t put my finger on what is the normal programme and what is new that coming out as a consequence of L’Internationale. The distinctive contribution has not been visible to the local art scene in Antwerp. I can’t see how the current show on Rave culture contributes to this discourse. It is not yet clear how the collection has been transformed as a consequence of L’Internationale. The aim of breaking from the Euro-​American canon is valid, but it has not yet materialized enough. (Pascal Gielen, interview, Antwerp, 12 September 2016)

Heterocosmoi 81 5 Maria Davila and Teresa Velazquez, interview, Madrid, 2 September 2016. 6 Meric Oner, interview, Istanbul, 25 August 2016. 7 Manuel Borja-​Villel, interview, Madrid, 1 September 2016. From the curator’s perspective, the “failures” of the exhibition were also productive. Through the process of research they not only discovered the cultural and economic structures that stimulated new hybrid visual formation but also negotiated the loan of works from locally controlled and state sources and also witnessed the complicity between images and cultural authority, as well as the replaying of the hegemonic struggle to represent Latin American art in a neocolonial context (Creischer et al. 2013). 8 Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. 9 For an excellent account of the worldwide spread of these examples that include the construction of archives, the sharing of cooking, production of digital distribution platform, information sharing, and educational programming under the alternative heading of the “paracuratorial”, see McDowell (2016). 10 Ferran Barenblit, interview, Barcelona, 6 September 2016. 11 Z. Badovinac, The Present and Presence, unpublished lecture, www.mg-​lj.si/​en/​ exhibitions/​1135/​the-​present-​and-​presence-​–​-​repetition-​9/​, accessed 1 June 2018. 12 Luc Deleu, interview, Antwerp, 13 September 2016.

Chapter 5

The constituents

The steps, ramps, and plaza surrounding MACBA form a skater’s paradise. Whether the skaters are on their low rumbling cruisers, performing high-​ cracking tricks, wearing loose-​fitting LOVE + HATE shirts, their presence is also like the apparition of another life. It is beside the point whether the skaters enter or hinder the Museum. More importantly, they are out there, and in motion. Without a discernible hierarchy they follow a discrete order, taking turns in unspoken sequences. In their singular endeavours they come together to glide with the ground and flick themselves into another gravity. Skaters are all too often dismissed as disaffected youth. Disaffected from what? In the eyes of many civic planners, skaters are a curse. To cleanse the squares and return them to their docile tranquillity, steps are embossed with studs and flat surfaces are grassed over. The plaza at MACBA is not dysfunctional; rather, it is parafunctional. It is from this rancourous and stunted discourse on the identity of the skater that I now examine the efforts by the members of L’Internationale to engage members of the public as constituents. What is the difference between the constituent and the visitor? How do we distinguish them from a general audience, regular participants, seasonal tourists, and occasional bystanders? To what extent do they need to be involved in the museum to be part of it? At the time I visited, MACBA was hosting the exhibition PUNK.1 With the designation of punk inside the museum, and with the skaters coming and going, the tensions of museal display and heterotopian escape became even more pronounced. As early as 1966, John Berger lamented that “no curator dreams of considering that his work begins with us” (1969: 35). In this typically pithy manner Berger condemned the institutions of art for reducing their sense of custodial care to a proprietorial obsession with preserving precious objects and perpetuating an outdated form of connoisseurship. At that time most museum curators saw themselves primarily as the “keepers” of objects with high symbolic value. Berger’s response was filled with vehement indignation, but it also launched a prophecy. He declared that, first, the museum should be driven by “imagination”. Second, that art should be liberated from the “mystique which is attached to them as property objects”. Third, and most

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tellingly, he stressed that the revolutionary potential of art was most evident when it “becomes possible to see them as testimony to the process of their own making instead of as products; to see them in terms of action instead of finished achievement” (1969:  37). In order to realize these principles, he called on museums to collaborate with each other, share their collections, and “become a living school” (1969: 39).2 Exactly half a century after Berger’s essay, there is now a small constellation of museums and art spaces such as SAN Art, Townhouse, Tensta Konsthall, and Clark House that, like L’Internationale, have gone against the trend that pushes curators to be managers of an “asset class” (Kortun 2018a). This shift has meant that the function of these places is not primarily defined by the need to collect auratic objects and create a worshipful environment. In 2016, L’Internationale, in collaboration with their partner Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), hosted a conference called “The Constituent Museum”.3 The organizers asked:  “What would happen if museums put relationships at the centre of their work?” They also set out to explore the possibility of a “museum in which the visitor is not a passive receiver of predefined content, but a member of a constituent body, who provokes, informs and co-​produces programmes”.4 These radical questions and propositions take aim at the “inclusive” public relations strategies that purport to “reach out” and “bring in” new audiences, but perpetuate passive consumption (Douglas 2013). As public outreach programmes have been adopted by the mainstream institutions, much of their agenda has shrunk and their creative friction dissolved. Even Sir Nicholas Serota, in his plan for the future of the Tate, informed his staff that “engaging audiences by listening to their interests and expectations has become the principal challenge for a museum in the modern world. Invitation and dialogue, rather than Olympian instruction, have become the necessary voice of the institution” (2014).5 In this chapter, my aim is not to recount the different strategies of public engagement in the respective museums of L’Internationale. The complex histories that exist within each institution are beyond the scope of this book. While drawing from the legacies, and in particular, the experience of the staff who are still active, the aim is to determine how these lessons and principles can shape an outlook for the museums of the commons. Hence, my attention is ultimately looking towards the way the museums not only engage with their local histories but also build on a tranversal knowledge. While some museums have collaborated with artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose whole practice, not just the opening party, involves “sculpting hospitality”, and commemorated the work of others like David Medalla, who famously initiated a biennial in London in which all were welcomed to the Statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus to announce their participation as artists, we should nevertheless be aware that they are, after all, professional organizations that survive by being able “to rethink [their] relationship to [their] opposite”

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(Harney & Moten 2013: 32). The scepticism towards this participation bonanza is well summed up in the call out to a more recent conference in Vienna called After Audience: Twentieth-​ century European social democracy wanted to make the “uneducated classes” into the audience of high culture. Social advancement through education, culture for all, and finally, with a turn from reception to production: culture by all. Around and after the translocal events of 1968, the practices broadly tested in these programs in “the West” and elsewhere provoked all kinds of successes and failures, culminating in the band collective, the commune, and the dissolution of art into life. At some point in the final decades of the twentieth century, this emancipatory narrative tipped into a dystopian one. Participation became an imperative, joining a principle, and self-​activation –​so as to not completely exclude oneself from social media and self-​governing networks –​a duty. For its part, neoliberal management wants to measure the audience to the utmost detail and “tap into” new audiences that can be measured. Here, too, a circle reaches its completion: from the audience of high art to the audit, the examination of performance figures as new high art. Eventually, the amalgam of these very different policies became a key aspect of the Creative Europe program as “audience development”.6 To gain another vantage point, let us return to the image of skaters at MACBA, and also add another view of the “users” at SALT. The skaters may or may not know what goes on in MACBA. It is hard to tell whether they are indifferent, or even mildly appreciative, that something aesthetic occurs adjacent to their plaza. They circle around and shoot past its entrance. For most of the time they lurk on the cusp, neither in nor out. MACBA’s austere architectural design may even generate some added impetus in the desire to perform a “cut out”. Let us put aside the easy declaration that the skaters are sovereign agents, and at the same time also dispense with the smug dismissals by the enemies of youth. At SALT, Vasif Kortum describes a comparable scenario and presents a more empathic attitude towards young users: From Fall through Spring we get thousands of young people, each with study books in front of them as they prepare for the national university qualification exams. They come and occupy all parts of the building, the stairways, café, spaces around the atrium because SALT Research is simply not enough to host them all. In the mornings they queue in front of the building to reserve a seat, average time spent in the building is two hours and forty minutes. We open a workshop area for them on Saturdays. Our dictum was Hüseyin Alptekin’s notion of “democratic luxury”, who borrowed it from someone else. Water and internet is free, the toilets are well-​maintained, the institution does not look at them as if

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they were a cockroach. Because it is an ecology, they are tomorrow. We called them the “users”. They are the people who will not often follow an exhibition, or attend a talk, but are nevertheless essential. They make the place their own in occupying it. We watch and learn from them, they don’t know they are teaching us.7 If we stay with Kortun’s image of the museum as a “flotilla of individual boats rather than a mothership” (2018a), then we can ask how is the relationship between the museum and the constituents distinguished from a missionary activity that seeks to convert rattling skaters and recruit diligent students?

What is a constituent? Many museums have already been busy shoring up their claims that they represent diverse communities, that they have developed multi-​tiered patron circles, opened themselves to sponsors, recruited members through social media, and employed mediators to bridge the work of their most obscure subjects with the lifeworlds of ordinary people. By contrast, artist collectives are increasingly defining their mode of operation as “self-​organized”, looking for alternative sites and developing complex partnerships. There were also a number of short-​lived examples of what is known as “new institutionalism”.8 At MACBA (directed by Manuel Borja-​Villel 1998–​2008), the Kunstverein München (directed by Maria Lind 2001–​ 2004), and Rooseum Malmo (directed by Charles Esche 2000–​2004), there were determined efforts to transform the gallery space into a laboratory for experimentation in public participation.9 Where does the notion of the constituent fit into this spectrum of publics –​patron, sponsors, members, mediators, visitors –​and how can the confederation of L’Internationale provide a more sustainable environment for working with constituents? At the 2016 “The Constituent Museum” conference, the organizers defined the identity of constituents as if it were “fluid, mutable, protean. As such they are always in the process of both becoming and unbecoming”.10 Indeed, but that is true for all identities! So we need to look more closely at their actions. But this is not straightforward. For while the museums in L’Internationale wanted to see themselves as forging a confederation, a model of solidarity that was both more enduring than a network and less hierarchical that a political structure, the definition of the constituents draws on many features associated with networks and politics. For instance, at the conference there was a wide range of participants from the different curatorial teams of L’Internationale, as well as individual artists, critics, and members from a number of different artistic collectives. It was proposed that other potential constituents include women from migrant communities who rebel against the patriarchy of ethnic leadership; people who labour in the arts but who are not acknowledged as either cultural producers or patrons; and activists and

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pioneers who challenge the dominant structures. As constituents were defined by their fluid practices, the idea of constituencies was also defined through the medium of collaboration. In particular, it was stressed that the emphasis on collaborative production in a museum could disrupt the conventional preoccupation with material acquisition and open up new modes of social connection. It was proposed that the constituent museum would overturn the top-​down models of colonial authority and usher forth “a rhizomatic network of exchange”. In pantxo rama’s (aka Francesco Salvini) proposal for the conference, he argued that the museum functions as a site of antagonism, and that the future of the constituent museum is not to substitute one institution with another but to undertake “transformation as transition”.11 This argument restated the status of antagonism, not simply as a problem to be resolved but as the perpetual grit within institutional dynamics. The antagonism that constituents bring forward is thus not seen as a temporary phase but as part of the ongoing process of transformation. Daniela Ortiz noted that the idea of the constituent could address the dominance of the refusal grid in the everyday lives of Europe’s migrant populations: “Refused residency permit, refused visa, nationality application refused”. However, she also claimed that refusal can be switched into an empowerment tool:  “refusal to integrate; refusal to be subject to European norms; refusal to assume as normal the colonial narratives; and refusal to follow the mechanisms of illegalisation and legalisation”.12 Throughout the conference, the representatives from the various partner organizations of L’Internationale outlined their respective strategies to develop relationships with different groups. However, there was also a wish to reflect and map out a new conceptual framework for the future of the museum: one that is not captured within either the remnants of state ideology or the consumerist practices in the marketplace. In political theory, “constituents” refers to people of a given area that elect a representative. It can refer to both an individual voter and a collective. As the keynote speaker at the Middlesbrough conference Anthony Gardner pointed out, the term “constituent” is embedded in a political discourse that ties the citizen to a bounded community: “Constituency in particular has long been the preferred word for a politics of representation: not just for a politician’s audience, but those to whom politicians argue they are responsible, who they represent, perhaps to whom they may even be accountable”.13 Is this the “tedium of endless meetings and long speeches”, and the suffocation of creativity under the weight of accountability and representative duty, what L’Internationale is signing up to? For Raul Sanchez Cedillo, a philosopher and activist who has collaborated with Manuel Borja-​Villel, the term constituent has nothing to do with its banal meaning as a body of electors or a special interest group. It is drawn from the revolutionary theories of the common and the multitude, which Sanchez Cedillo claims are the “ever haunting

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democratic excesses” that exist on the “dark side of capitalist modernity” (2018:  32). Working against the grain of classical political theory, Sanchez Cedillo posed the “new constituencies” within four matrices that he summed up under the headings of the postcolonial, technopolitical, anthropogenetic, and post-​national. Art is not a discrete matrix for approaching the “constituencies problem”, because as Sanchez Cedillo claims, “I see it here and there throughout these matrices” (2018: 41). Thus for key players in L’Internationale the challenge is to incorporate constituents to “shape the future of the institution”.14 Vasif Kortun makes this distinction even clearer as he declares that it is important to not “over-​identify communities, reduce concrete existence into representation, and/​or disregard the specific individual. Constituents should not be confused with communities”.15 When there are so many bad options, the ways forward are far from clear. Even as many artistic collectives have acknowledged that it is not enough to expose the institutional flaws, and are aware that an escape to a mythical uncontaminated space is just a fantasy, there is also a recognition that a third option of developing new models of self-​organization is contradictory: “Only the deregulated stand a chance of imagining an ‘outside’, but while doing so they embrace a precariousness that makes them ever more reliant on, or at least at the mercy of, centralised, regulated systems” (Drabble 2013: 21). Institutional critique and the production of new subjectivities are important, but change also requires the invention of new “tools that enable the public imaginary to flow into and eventually transform institutions from within” (Kortun 2018a). In the following sections of this chapter I will outline three phases in the development of the constituent museum. These phases are not organized as if they are part of a singular progressive narrative. Rather, the phases are seen as operating on different temporalities and according to specific historical contexts. They are relational to each other, but do not necessarily build upon each other in a linear manner. Similarly, while the term constituent has gained traction among the members of L’Internationale, there is no consensus on its meaning, and it is apparent that it operates in distinct ways in each context. Amongst the partners there are different degrees of approach, varying forms of engagement, and considerable variations in the kinds of people who are defined as constituents. In some cases the constituents propose an agonistic and tense sense of “ownership” the museum; in others they adopt fleeting and tactical relations.16 The constituents can be assertive of their specific identity, or else, there are other constituents that glide over the need for identification. To sharpen these distinctions and also address the less visible participants, I will also introduce the term “other constituents”. Reflecting on this brief history, I  see the different phases as both a set of experiments  –​but not in the sense that a scenario is established to test a proposition in a controlled environment, and as experiences that are not just incidental encounters on a random journey. The two terms –​experiment and

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experience –​are folded together. As the artist Jimmie Durham reminds us, the experience of an experiment –​either by metaphor, or “like a bee-​sting” –​ is the only way we learn (1993: 7).

The MACBA moments in constituent power Manuel Borja-​Villel was appointed director of MACBA in 1998. Prior to this he was the director of Fundació Antoni Tàpies, from 1989 to 1998. He would remain at MACBA for a decade. During this period Barcelona was undergoing a radical process of urban renewal and gentrification. The “creative cities” rhetoric that promoted rapid growth in the cultural industries had captured the ear of the public elites. However, as a leading art institution in Barcelona, MACBA was also captive to the complex, and at times contradictory, aspirations of cultural nationalism and corporate rejuvenation: In this context I began to develop an exhibition programme that sought to focus on the sociopolitical transformations of the city, to invite artists like Hans Haacke, Craigie Horsfield, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, to address the complicities between art and capital, find examples in which the overwhelming consensus towards the “success story” could be questioned, as well as develop partnerships with economists, theorists and activists that would widen the perspective on the space of the common and the place of contemporary art. This may have had limited effects, but in the collaboration with one of the neighbourhood community groups, I felt that we witnessed the emergence of a critical voice. On arrival at MACBA I observed that the institution was dominated by three separate lines of power. First, there was a vision of the Museum that was dominated by its iconic architectural form and the self-​belief that this contributed to prestige and tourism, and that engagement with art and the local community was secondary. Second, there was a powerful group that saw the Museum as an embodiment of the miracle of Catalan modernism, as if the Catalan nation was the origin of modernism, and the function of the Museum was show this to the world. Third, there was the more instrumental and pragmatic sense that the Museum should highlight and promote the work of emerging artists in order to both recognize their historical value but also lever them into the marketplace. My response to this power struggle was to introduce a department of public programming that was to have an overarching responsibility  –​ addressing both the antagonisms and fragmentation in the neoliberal political context, and also to puncture the mythical ideals that pervaded the local cultural scene. We began by tracking the new anti-​globalization

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movements, and generating new seminar programmes on art and urbanism. The aim was not just a discursive mapping, but to use the museum as a dispositif for cultural change.17 Borja-​Villel commenced an ambitious project in not only rethinking the art-​ historical paradigms on modernity but also situating the museum as a site for contesting the public sphere. This meant not only expanding the horizons of artistic production beyond the Euro-​American axis of influence but also admitting new artistic collectives and social movements as key agents for shaping the organization of the museum. Redefining required a rethinking of the role of public engagement in all the phases of cultural production. Through the “Disagreements” and “Agencies” collaborative research projects, MACBA embarked on a more “socially committed” approach to Spanish art history (Borja-​Villel & Exposito 2017:  128). Jorge Ribalta, as Head of the Public Programs, was also clear that the existing models for public engagement were insufficient, and that the postmodern paradigm of selective incorporation was politically meaningless as it promoted a false sense of participation. Ribalta preferred a more experimental approach that he termed “new institutionality”, and he aimed to generate a new “collaborative space in which the Museum began to form part of social struggle” (2009: 250). He was aware of the wide range of social movements and alternative agents that the museum could collaborate with. Barcelona was at the crossroads of complex forces. According to Ribalta, these experiments in cooperation between MACBA and social movements peaked in June 2001. It involved a wide range of actors. Some have become iconic in the antiglobalization movement and in Spanish politics, but others, while having an urgency and able to press hard at the time, are less visible. In retrospect Ribalta asserts that the temporality in which these movements operated is often under-​represented, and I also accept that in this chapter, I have little capacity to give form to the traces that they left in the museum and the repercussions that they have for the field of art.18 MACBA was also a platform for complex philosophical debates on the intersections between cultural practice, political theory, and social activism. During the early period, political and cultural theorists such as Chantal Mouffe, Paolo Virnio, Jacques Rancière, Édouard Glissant, Suely Rolnik, and Michael Warner gave seminars, and later on Gerald Raunig and Isabell Lorey were invited to give lectures at MACBA. Mouffe argued that there is no realistic opportunity to initiate political change without engaging with public institutions. She rejected the possibility of a purist escape, an exodus from the contaminated spaces of politics. Hence, by wrestling with public institutions, she claimed that one could loosen the totalizing grip of neoliberalism and open up agonistic public spaces. Mouffe was, in turn, familiar with the MACBA exhibitions such as “Antagonisms” (2001)19 and “Art and Utopia: Action Restricted” (2004),20 and in other contexts had written extensively on Liam Gillick (Mouffe 2013). This discursive exchange encouraged

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Borja-​Villel to believe that they could produce a new kind of postcolonial museum –​one that was dislodged from the old hegemonic footings: We wanted the museum to challenge people and to be challenged by them: we wanted it to become an activating force. So the question was how to empower society: how to offer tools to allow the citizens to exercise their political agency through the institution. (Borja-​Villa & Exposito 2017: 124) However, there was also naivete in some parts of the institution over the identification of the groups, the flow of power, and the control of material resources. What does MACBA’s term “agencies” connote?21 In English, the term suggests a service provider, like in real estate, whereas, in Spanish, the term was intended to reflect the diversity and affirmative force of external bodies.22 According to Tonina Cerda, at first MACBA had a paternalistic approach insofar as they intended to give power to the agencies. They soon discovered that this could be inverted.23 While the museum introduced independent study programmes and self-​organization platforms in 2006, it also noted that the agencies already knew that they had the power and were quick in taking resources from the institution. For some of the curators at MACBA, this was a source of consternation and confusion. In time, there was an understanding that constituent power is only formed from the reciprocal encounter between the public and the institution: We wanted to give power to the groups. We also invited leading figures from around Europe such as Franco Berardi (Bifo) or Antoni Negri to think with us other manners of working from the outside of the museum. The activist groups were also insistent that we extend our activities beyond the space of the Museum. Hence, we hired spaces in the square outside of the Museum and in neighboring streets. In these places we conducted workshops or seminars where some material like posters or publications were produced. It was a period of intensity; there was friction between the groups and the museum, as well as within the museum. It was also the moment when we started the Independent Study Program (PEI) as a way to have a platform from where we could think and deal with the question of agency or constituency, among other questions.24 MACBA turned to face the groups that were outside of the institution because key figures were convinced that the previous methods of public engagement had failed, and they sought more direct connections to the emergent cultural and political movements. From the perspective of the “agencies”, culture is not a fixed entity that can be gathered and then put on display. Culture is the dynamic and creative process of interaction. It belongs to those who are making it. This means that no single authority had the capacity to address

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the complexities of social and cultural change. To avoid being governed from above once again, the agencies rejected the proposition of selecting a new representative. Gerald Raunig, another visiting theorist that was active in the late phases, also argued that the “good life” was not in finding the right leader but through a horizontal distribution of power (2013: 175). However, Raunig was also highly conscious of the risk that art institutions, wittingly or unwittingly, tended to reproduce the new public management discourse on flexible work, and that artists would also legitimize a precarious form of existence. Hence, he warned that radicality was not to be found in an imaginary portrayal of another world, or in the call for the restitution of a past world, but rather it was articulated through “instituent practice” (Raunig 2013: 176). Of course, instituent practices are uncertain. Their momentum can affirm the relations of radical equality as much as they can subtract the ground upon which another institution rests.25 The emphasis on “instituent” practices shifts the identification of a political entity, or what MACBA called the “agencies”, and focuses more on the collaborative modes of production and the distribution of responsibilities that inject other relations and possibilities into institution making. This link will develop, most of all, from direct and indirect concatenation with political practices and social movements, but without dispensing with artistic competences and strategies, without dispensing with resources and effects in the art field. (Raunig 2002) Raunig’s repetition of “without dispensing” is not mere stylistic emphasis. It speaks to a deep anxiety of the hierarchy between activism and art, and the dread of instrumentalization. Raunig repeats the need for specific artistic skills and aesthetic fields in order to suggest that while art seems to come in at second place, it is not a secondary effect of the political. Artists are never mere illustrators and the institutions are not redundant spaces. Similarly, it should be noted that when Raunig discusses “instituent practices”, he does not refer to any specific group. This is not an intellectual failure or an incidental omission. The absence of naming is expressive of a preference to expend energy in the clarification of action. Therefore, the point of linking art with social movements is not just the demarcation of roles that prioritize the political over the aesthetic, but the instituting of shared practices. After Borja-​Villel left MACBA and accepted the role of director at the Reina Sofia in 2008, and Ribalta returned to his practice as a photographer, the partnerships with the agencies fragmented and imploded. In 2009, the global financial crisis hit Spain particularly hard. For many of the remaining and committed staff at MACBA, this was a period of despair. Teresa Grandas noted that with the appointment of Bartomeu Mari as director, it was also

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difficult to balance the development of internal programmes with the extra work of L’Internationale.26 There were practical constraints on the capacity of staff to dedicate time to expand their programme and collaborate with other members. The projects with the agencies had also reached an impasse. Tensions over budgets, discomfort over messy events, and frustration with scheduling made the curators feel that it was unsustainable. Reflecting on this history, Sonia Lopez pondered whether, like Rutger Hauer as the replicant in the closing scene to the film Blade Runner, she was doomed to be left standing on a soaked and crumbling ledge, and resigning herself to the feeling that “all those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain”.27 It would be all too easy to conclude that these “failures” were caused by immaturity and a lack of realism.28 It is also tempting to summon the arresting caricatures –​the exploiting institution and the exploited outsiders. Such negative assignations, while comforting those who believe that good intentions always end up in paralysis, also miss the significance of the disruptive energy of micro-​events, minimize the transformative potential of radical action, and deny the forms of sociality that, as Lopez also noticed, would otherwise never appear in a museum. Some projects are very brief, and of course, mistakes are made on all sides, and while the emergence of constituent power is never complete, it is not entirely trapped inside the grip of institutional forms of domination. Constituent power is not condemned to repeat the pre-​existing forms of constituted power.

Figure 5.1 IRWIN,  The 80s:  Today’s Beginings? Curators, Nick Aiken & Diana Franssen, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

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Regional constituents Since the pioneering experiments of working with agencies in MACBA, and the theoretical debates on constituent power, a range of strategies have been developed by some of the other partners in L’Internationale. In this section I will explore some of the regional, and transitional, applications of the concept of constituent. For instance, MG+MSUM adopted the concept of the constituent museum in order to frame their close association with the community of artists, intellectuals, and scientists and the history of their engagement with civil society movements, NGOs, activists, and artist-​run spaces.29 This approach to working with constituents also reaffirms the value of working in more individual manner and solidarity, taking micro steps, such as when a refugee asylum opened in the neighbourhood of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, we initiated a series of activities with the residents, mostly young men from Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan. Similarly, we supported the activists during an incident in the nearby ex-​ bicycle factory, now turned into an autonomous zone Rog, occupied by activists, squatters, artists, students, and workers. When the city authorities wanted to have their building demolished, we contributed a work of art from our collection to install it in a temporary exhibition at the premises. It was a gesture of solidarity and an expression of connection between Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM) and the Autonomous Centre Rog. This idea of the constituents provides a closer understanding of the links and joints between the institution and its publics.30 The idea of working with constituents has been a method of relocalizing art institutions, but it is also framed in a wider effort to counter the dominant Euro-​American narratives. This dual sense of local and global was acutely expressed by artists in Eastern Europe. IRWIN, one of the peer group of artists associated with Moderna galerija, were not only conscious that they were on the periphery of Western European consciousness, but that they had inherited a disciplined form of contextual blindness, a trained aversion of the artistic gaze away from the cultural production generated by their own neighbours. As a consequence, they were not only ignorant of other artists in their region, but they admitted that they lacked a language for communication. In response, the institutional site was seen as a vital apparatus for constituting a new grid of exchange and initiated a programme for building cultural “embassies” across the region. The fantasy of exceptionalism is a delusion that renders most artists into obscurity and indulgence. Artists in East Europe need to develop a critical and conceptual apparatus to define their own practice in relation to that of others. In East Europe the idea that artists sought to establish an

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alternative space was at first nonsensical. To build an alternative assumes that there is a hegemonic that needs to be confronted. However, there was no such engagement with the dominant within the national system, and even less knowledge of the practices in neighboring countries. Knowledge of artistic practices In Eastern Europe was extremely limited. Most people only learnt about contemporary art from the Western magazines. If an artist did not appear there, then in a sense they did not exist.31 The Van Abbemuseum is in another institution that is undergoing a radical transition. It claims to be shifting from being an “object-​oriented depot to custodians of affective relations”.32 By heading out to “where the action is” and linking up with groups to form a regional “grid of attention”, Charles Esche argues that it also generates a reflexive twist on, rather than abandonment of, their art collection: The physicality of the Museum is as important as ever. The function of defining criteria for inclusion and exclusion, developing an index to identify and classify objects is still important. But we need to rethink these spatial and classificatory procedures to address the field of affective relations. Thus the architecture of the Museum needs to be considered more from the perspective of sociality than from simply as a depot for precious objects. We need to find ways to both listen to the feedback from the public and also generate opportunities for people to leave their comments. For instance, if you transform the room of the museum from a display cabinet of completed works, to the idea that the room is a workshop, that the art is open to being used by the visitor, then after each interaction the following visitor will be contributing to a collective work, or sort of participating in a open conversation. In a holistic museum, roles should be fluid to a certain extent. Curators and mediators should be able to perform each other’s task. When mediators curate, and curators mediate, then both are involved in the feedback process. The point is not to simply add up the message left by the people, but to pick up the relation that turns people into constituents. In this way, they are not learning from but engaging with constituents. In this conduct of work we get access to other parts of the city, and the city puts us to work in different ways. The Museum becomes an echo box, and produces reverberations that we would not anticipate in advance. This is evident in projects led by Tania Bruguera and Ahmet Ogut.33 Bart De Baere’s vision of working with constituents at M HKA provides a further twist on the relationship between art and politics. De Baere’s vision reflects a political orientation that is driven by weak links and a commitment to openness. He does not focus on overt ideological oppositions but is drawn to working with constituents as a way of “activating potentialities” and heightening the opportunity to “explore ambiguities”. This approach has been rendered in two ways. First, artists have been actively shaping the collection

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through the format of interventions, merging their work with their selection and display of other works in the collection,34 and secondly, the communities around M HKA has been invited to take over part of the presentation and programming of events.35 The most radical moment was moment in 2006 when a group of Belgian Moroccans refused to be included as a minority. They declared: “We consider all the main cultural institutions to be ours!” We agreed with this proposition and invited them to take over the entire museum for a whole season. Their first response was to invite other smaller communities. Every week one of those had in that period a weekend festival there. This weekend the Afghans, the next one the north Caucasians. In a second project they also defined a new mental cartography of Moroccan cultural space as extending right across North Africa and also including the worldwide Moroccan diaspora and people of mixed origins. The third project was their view of the collection. A group of their people worked on that for a year, meeting on weekends, shaping the choice, and arguing it on videos that were on display in the exhibition spaces. This selection we later brought to Rabat. It was the first large international contemporary art exhibition ever there.36 This exhibition and process of engagement was for De Baere operationally focused on “effectiveness not representation”.37 It also resonated with the non-​representation vision of commoning practices (Gielen 2019). What is particularly useful about the idea of the commons as distinct from the idea of a community is that it does not depend upon any presumption that the participants in a commons will be bound together by shared identity or a homogeneous culture. (Gilbert 2014: 165) What matters most for De Baere is the productive tension between the formal construction of constituents and the not-​yet-​disciplined impulse to come together. In the unbounded moment before you have the constitution you have a constituency. You have a meeting of people who decide on a constitution. So the moment when you’re busy making a constitution and you don’t have a constitution yet, that’s the moment I like in art.38 Assembling through free will and collaborating to give form to the collective agency is what inspires De Baere, rather than the production of a constitution that serves as a rule book for policing the people. Starting from a vision that is both localized and open, Bart De Baere extended the possibility of constituent membership to all dimensions of time.

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It is open to “all those who have ever lived, all who are living and all who will live”.39 For De Baere, unlike his framing views on the foundations of the confederation where he wanted a structure that was stronger and more durable than a network, the relationship with the constituents is at its most vital when it is conceived in “weak and fluid” terms. In the hither and thither of experimentation, he argues that the constituents create a process of “contamination, cross-​checking and reflexivity. Things become alive when there is friction between different elements. It is the friction between ideas and experience, or tradition and uncertitude that is the life force of the museum”.40 Pascal Gielen, a scholar and theorist closely involved with M HKA, takes a more practical approach, and argues that the relationship with constituents can stimulate reforms and bolster the defences of the institution. He sees constituents as being able to operate both inside institutions and across different class positions. In ideal situations, professionals can also usefully serve as constituents. They can use their expertise to solve problems and “latch onto the energy of social movements and reclaim some of the institution’s lost ground in terms of criticality and autonomy from the market”.41 These transitional and regional views on constituents do not always capture the more elusive forms of the “other constituents”. The other constituents are neither latent elements waiting to be switched on nor components that need to be integrated into the body. Success for the other constituents is not as simple as the metropolitan boast: I am in Artforum, therefore I exist. They are there in the public, but not lurking in its shadows, and certainly not condemned to isolation due to lacking any connecting joints. While the other constituents may appear to be stuck in a place and bored, this location and expression is both a defiance against the spheres of interest, and an expression that they there because they have refused to be anywhere else. The problem with the conception of regional constituents is that it is often bound to hegemonic identity formations, at risk of being reduced to another lobby group, and vulnerable to co-​option within the new neoliberal framework of participatory politics and collaborative co-​production. A few years after her affirmation of the critical potential developed at MACBA, Chantal Mouffe was also questioning whether artists and cultural workers had been incorporated into the new modes of capitalist production: The aesthetic strategies of the counter-​culture: the search for authenticity, the ideal of self-​management, the anti-​hierarchical exigency, are now used in order to promote the conditions required by the current mode of capitalist regulation, replacing the disciplinary framework characteristic of the Fordist period. Nowadays artistic and cultural production play a central role in the process of capital valorization and, through a “neo-​ management”, artistic critique has become an important element of capitalist productivity. (2007)

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A bit more SALT As part of the opening exhibition at SALT, the artist Huseyin Alptekin declared:  “I am not a studio artist. I  like site-​specific work. I  feel myself exiled everywhere”.42 Unlike all the other partners of L’Internationale, SALT is not a public museum with a collection. It was founded by a commercial patron and receives funding from a range of philanthropic sources. Located on the European side of Istanbul, Vasif Kortun is deeply conscious of the dangers of exposure within a repressive political environment. Kortun grew up in a cosmopolitan and secular environment. Translations of Greek and Russian books of poetry were commonplace in the family home. The image of Istanbul that inspired Kortun’s direction of the third Istanbul Biennial (1993), and which you find in the early books by Orhan Pamuk and Latife Tekin, has almost vanished. Kortun appreciates “Turkey’s ambivalent relationship to the West”, but he is also indignant over the extent to which both sides are increasingly oppositional (2019: 7). Hence, Kortun reveals that not all the “constituents will be visible to the outside or to the public”, for, as he also notes, while SALT receives ideas that start “in the heat”, it has to both “navigate levels of visibility extremely carefully” and “ferment” ideas “in a cool, dark place”.43 In this section I will also seek to differentiate the idea of constituents by first decoupling it from its conventional setting in representative political discourses, and then locating it on the other side of cultural and social production. At SALT they adopt a range of terms for specific situations:  “we have been thinking of the concepts of users, communities of interest, professionalized audiences, constituencies as opposed to terms such as audiences, customers, or visitors” (Kortun 2018a). When I was growing up, the term “user” was slang for someone who exploits others. At SALT it has a less instrumental application. A user is not a free rider but someone who contributes “content, knowledge and value” (Wright 2013: 11) and is, in this sense, closer to the multisensorial mode of engagement that Brian Massumi calls “activist” practice (2011: 13). Once again we should recall that SALT was not conceived primarily as a visual art institution. The founding aim was neither to identify the cutting-​ edge examples of contemporary art nor to append social engagement onto contemporary artists’ practice. The place of contemporary art was always embedded in a wider social and interdisciplinary context. Hence, the idea of the constituent at SALT is not defined around the nucleus of artistic practice. Vasif Kortun is insistent that SALT is both free from upholding this aesthetic agenda and also aware of the modest role that the institution takes in initiating political change. For instance, two years before the 2013 Gezi Park protest movement, SALT had already organized over 90 events that addressed the issues of public space and the environment in Istanbul. This included projects that examined a wide range of topics, from the availability

Figure 5.2 Dragan Živadinov, Breda Kralj, Roman Uranjek, and Andrej Savski putting up the NSK flag and the plague at the NSK Embassy Moscow (initiated and organized by IRWIN) in 1992. Photograph: Jože Suhadolnik. Courtesy of artists.

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of soccer fields, to the health of fishing stock, and with some pride, Meric Oner noted that these projects reverberated with, if not influenced, the formation of the protest movement. “In some ways”, she says, “these projects released a virus into the city”.44 In turn, the protest movement transformed the institution. Vasif Kortun also recalled how humbled and inspired he was by the Gezi movement and the way it unfolded in programmes such as an “infirmary, library, vegetable garden etc. It showed the density of public intelligence and distributed knowledge that the linear broadcast model can never achieve”. After witnessing the brutal events that crushed the movement, Kortun also noted that they redesigned their own programme from a “post-​ Gezi perspective”.45 Among the partners in L’Internationale, SALT has the most extensive relationship to constituents. Basak Caka has counted over 50 groups, initiatives, organizations, and institutions.46 As an institution it is directed towards multidisciplinary knowledge production. SALT is also distinctive in that it tracks the impact of these groups through a mapping process that differentiates between the points of contribution that others make within an identified frame, the extent to which a programme stretches the making of exhibition, the interactions by users that initiate new points in a programme, the articulation of either an idea that alters the interpretive frame or an intuition that leads in an unexpected idea, and the scope of participation that can open up the forms of discussion in a programme. Hence, Vasif Kortun reveals that a film festival or a research initiative that SALT has hosted for three to five years may have limited effect on the institution, whereas a collaboration with an individual or a group, even if it is a one off, may have powerful traces on both the institution and the partners. The collaborations with graph commons, refik anadol, baron vonplastik, gapo have had such transformative aspects.47 This reflexive and discursive focus is also evident in the pioneering of online publications that are simple to design and free to download, and most striking, in terms of institutional priorities, is the allocation of the first and largest room in the building to the library. In a city like Istanbul, artists like Can Altay recognize that what is missing is not an institution that is dedicated to hosting spectacular exhibitions:  “when I  was studying to be an artist I didn’t need a studio, I needed a library”.48 Looking back at the early experiments with agencies at MACBA and the experience of working with the users at SALT, we can now glean a view of the other constituents from what they were doing, and how these actions made the institutions move in new directions. The other constituents cannot be defined in advance of these actions. They have no a-​priori identity. There is no list of interest groups, or territorial boundaries that mark the districts that individual constituents need to belong to in order to make a representative

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claim on each of the institutions. It is not even clear how the constituents contribute towards the making of the institution’s body. They are not marked exclusively by the categories of class, race, or gender. Therefore, there is no point in asking: “who is the constituent?” and expecting to be confronted by a coherent group. As, the former Head of Public Mediation at MACBA, Jorge Ribalta noted, the idea of the constituent is neither an abstraction that fits with global models, nor a modality that is confined to passive spectatorship. It can only exist in local places, emerge from specific events, and it requires a form of involvement that also accepts responsibility.49 Ribalta was in equal measure both adamant and melancholic over the future of the constituents: “it can only happen in the local”.50 Place clearly matters. Some groups are stuck, while others are highly mobile. Ideas can move, but they also morph as they enter different contexts. Mabel Tapia, a researcher and member of the collective Red de Conceptualismos del Sur (Network of Conceptualisms of the South), has defined their spatial relationship with Reina Sofia as being both “inside and outside the institution”, enabling them to develop partnerships and methodologies that “would not otherwise be possible”.51 It is unclear as to where to put the full stop on the future of the constituents in terms of place. As November Paynter recalled, the process of working with external groups at SALT was, at times, inspired by the need to slow things down, to release the institution from its own frenzied quest for novelty, but also an opportunity for the groups to give themselves the breathing space to let something else emerge.52 Borja-​Villel stressed that the oscillation between inside and outside that is produced by collectives such as Red de Conceptualismos del Sur is vital for producing a pluralist and relational world view –​one that does not go from the particular to the general, but from the local to the world as a whole (Borja-​Villel 2017a: 21). In response to the experience of working with SALT, Prem Krishnamurthy, the designer and curator from Project Projects, stressed the word “open”: I think that, in a word, the difference is that working with SALT is open. There’s an incredible and sometimes terrifying amount of freedom in working with the institution. Unlike other institutions where structures have typical paths and people have job descriptions that are mostly accurate –​when somebody is hired to design a book, they then design a book –​with SALT, it sometimes happens that you’re hired to design an identity or a logo, and in fact you end up making a curatorial exhibition program, or that you are designing an exhibition and in fact you end up programming events. So, there’s a kind of weird crossover and flexibility and mutability, and there’s sometimes something scary about that, because it means that in every situation, rather than being able to ever say, “Oh, well I just did the thing you told me to”, you actually always have to say, “Well, I’m doing the thing that I think is right for this scenario, I’m going to propose to

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SALT exactly what needs to happen here”. And I think with that kind of freedom comes a lot of responsibility, which is why working with SALT always feels a little bit more like working with a peer or a partner, rather than feeling like working for somebody.53 The examples from MACBA and SALT provide the bookends of this brief survey on what is now called the constituent museum. They provide powerful examples of working with external groups. The extent to which such experiments are sustainable and transferable is uncertain. What is a success at one point in time in an institution is not necessarily reproducible when there is a leadership change. Scale also matters. There are over 3.6  million Syrian refugees in Turkey. That is almost double the entire population of Solvenia. SALT operates in a megalopolis. Istanbul is bigger than the entire combination of all the other cities in the confederation. In general terms, there are signs of change. Through the process of “doing things together”, the constituent museum departs from the classical model of gather, classify, and display. However, the application of common principles and strategies must be negotiated over diverse terrains and within distinctive institutional frameworks. Thus far, while there have been significant examples of sharing works from their collections and expanding the idea of artistic and cross-​ institutional collaboration, it has not led to relinquishing the core legal duties and proprietorial claims.54 The constituent museum requires that curators do more than listen to others. It is not just an intelligence-​ gathering exercise (Boast 2011:  67). Similarly, feedback is not confined to testing the success or failure in realizing the institution’s preconceived goals. Dialogue involves a shared responsibility in shaping conceptual parameters and practical trajectories, or what the anthropologist George E.  Marcus calls opening up to “epistemic partnership” (2015). Whether you are an anthropologist doing fieldwork or a curator conducting a studio visit, rapport with your subjects is essential. As Marcus has observed, this space of open exchange is often marred by power differentials and colonial presuppositions. However, like the natives in the overstudied villages, artists can see curators coming in advance of their arrival. Contamination is a given and collaboration, when it is forged in terms of “epistemic partnership”, is therefore more than a benevolent gift. It is also a collective wrestle for the method and means of representation.55 Xavier Douroux explains this complex imbrication between material responsibility and the role of the imagination in art: But the problem is tricky, because even if we doubt the relevance of a self-​ centered model of art, it remains true that the nature of art must lead it, more than others, to preserve the capacity of relating back to itself: the possibility of a temporary closure as a condition for the collective subsequent re-​appropriation, to paraphrase Isabelle Stengers. If I take as a

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given the idea that the concept of mutual possession implies the propagation of a cooperative understanding of the world –​that which is understood, in turn understands that which understands it –​could we not use the term self-​possession to better characterize the specific thread of art in the skein of possessions. (Hers & Douroux 2013: 116) Perhaps constituent is a better term than self-​possession. It takes us closer to the “skein” of co-​production in perceptual and material worlds. After all, the person who is a constituent is active in more than simply either selecting from options or expressing likes. The constituent takes a position in relation to the commons, and in this role he or she not only shapes the social process but his or her subjectivity is also shaped by the encounter. This has direct implications for both perceptual frameworks and material priorities.

The other constituents Throughout this chapter I  have sought to outline how the concept of constituents has opened up new kinds of social relations that have the potential to redefine the function of the museum. It has been equally important to distinguish how the definition of the constituent museum is different from the now well-​established strategies for community engagement. It is seen as one of the biggest challenges facing L’Internationale. No museum has developed an infrastructure or programme that is wide enough to capture the mentalities of all the people that enter (ten Thije 2017: 66). This diversity boggles the representative ideal of the museum. To appreciate the difference between visitors, users, constituents, and the final category that I  have raised, the other constituents, let us consider an account of migrant mobs and refugees (Tazzioli & Garelli 2017). Unlike citizens, refugees move with no or barely any legal protection. Everywhere they go their movements are prejudged. Some are caught under the humanitarian gaze of worthiness and are thus deemed as deserving of the title of refugee. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a stigmatic gradation that ranges from the criminal smugglers, the illegals, to the economic opportunists. Once they have been negatively classified by the state, their movements tend to be deflected and dispersed, or else they are detained and displayed as a sign of deterrence. Despite these efforts to control and govern this unruly mob, they still manage to assemble. When they come together, they do not do so as either an ethnic tribe or as a group with predetermined membership. Where they come together is not necessarily where they seek to stay, let alone belong. However, the place of coming together says more about the collective thought that is formed in this encounter. Their assembly is tactical. They tend to move as individuals that are entangled as temporary collective formations. The place in which they exist is neither homely nor unhomely –​in the sense that

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it is a third space, where power has been renegotiated, it is also a non-​place. The motion that they endure is not a passage from one point to another. For the most part, their journey it appears as if it is motion without a motive. They are heading for Berlin or London. They are stuck at a border between Italy and France. They are dispersed to a remote provincial town. They find their way back to a frontier, where the police once again intercept them, they are moved on, and not for the first time they are either dispersed or detained. They are not invariably seeking to make a new home away from home, to build a new extension on the edges of the existing institutions. They simply want something else from what they are fleeing from. The chaos and non-​place of the other constituents point to the complex task of working with rather than speaking for the public. The other constituents, insofar as their “mob” presence is registered as an existential crisis, are both excessively visible and also exiled from institutional spaces. The agencies, users, and constituents may also seek to gather in a space that refuses to contribute to the mere restitution and reform of the institutions. How do the museums work with groups whom the state prefers to deflect and deter? This challenge was evident from the outset of Moderna galerija’s collaboration with migrants56 and MACBA’s engagement with the agencies. The museum wanted to bring different elements together to transform the museum. However, the agencies already operated in their own spheres and were naturally suspicious of being appropriated by an art world agenda. They were aware that they were already engaged in the issues that the institution wished to be involved in but was excluded from: They were conscious of this and they used it to interrogate us, to penetrate the discourses, to make further demands on the use of spaces and the allocation of economic resources, for example. In effect, they said, “You open the door and ask us to speak, so we come in and talk!” For some artists, like Allan Sekula, this was an exciting opportunity. The project he did with MACBA was developed in close collaboration with some of the groups.57 The challenges that MACBA faced at the turning point of the twenty-​first century have only multiplied since neoliberalism has made a ruin of the autonomous museum. According to Bart De Baere, the fault lies also with the activist’s vision of exodus.58 To counter this polarization, Kortun has argued that L’Internationale should switch from a “broadcast” model to developing along with the “collective intelligence” of its users. Rather than “targeting” audiences like a military machine, the institutions can translate research, intervene in debates, and realize multidisciplinary goals that are normally only achieved by nimble collectives and short-​lived artist groups (Kortun 2018a). A peer-​to-​peer approach is urgent: “After all it is not countries, but people in Europe that must learn how to cooperate”.59 The artist and

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activist who has been a long-​term and filial collaborator with Manolo Borja-​ Villel, Marcelo Exposito, also acknowledged that working with constituents was fraught. Speaking from his Federal parliamentary office, where he serves as an appointed member for En Comu Podem, he noted that the obstacles facing L’Internationale were comparable to the problem of renewing a vision for the left: It is not enough to promise a total revolution at some ideal point in the future, but we must also translate the principles, that are embodied in your diagram Surface-​Frame-​Grid, into the everyday life of people. In the past, artists, and the cultural sector in general, proposed “prototypes” to the people. The point of these prototypes is that they provided prisms for seeing the world, or models to be adopted at a later point in life. This process of internalization still reaffirmed the heroic status of the artist as the already enlightened figure and rendered the people as the ones in need of enlightening. The contemporary political and cultural struggle operates in a different sense of immediacy and satisfaction. We need to articulate the spaces in between cultural institutions and society, and people must experience and feel responsibility for the process of transformation. Thus we all have the right to be disappointed but also a co-​responsibility in the sphere of possibilities.60 Returning to the idea of the constituent museum as a messy space of experimentation, it is not easy to be optimistic. During the Gezi Park protest, Kortun saw glimpses of revolutionary transformation amidst the catastrophe: “The inside and the outside gets restructured, but it did not last”.61 Where to from here? In Toni Negri’s mapping of the modern revolutions, he argued that there was always a groundswell that eluded and refused to be contained within the institutional frameworks (1999). He argued that the most radical drivers for democratic participation and the insurgencies against autocratic rulers were all articulated through the form of constituent power. When the people see themselves as the sovereign, the subject that determines the forms of their own political and cultural life, rather than the beneficiaries, or victims of rule by an overlord, then the people as constituents also assume the authority to organize and institute their common life. Unlike the demand to leave all institutional spaces by ceding sovereignty to the demos, or the acceptance of the invitation to participate within the institutions, the idea of constituent power opens up another line of struggle. The constituent’s model recognizes the futility of exodus, but is also not so pessimistic as to predict that any comprehensive transfer of power is inevitably doomed. Hence, the options are not confined to do nothing or get co-​opted, but rather developed through para-​institutional operations and the convivial condition of “being together” (Harney & Moten 2013: 233). This idea of the constituent as the shaper of power has direct implications for the conception of the relationship between

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the museum and the public. It addresses the public not as a consumer, visitor, or even as participant, but as a partner who retains their inherent sovereignty. Central to this conception of the public as a sovereign partner is the challenge to the conventional vertical hierarchy of museum authority. In theory, there is a possibility for a whole new flow of power. The command system would not be centrally located, but dispersed across the modes of exchange with the public. In essence, the public as partner breaks out of the vertical structure of obedience and subservience, and is redistributed through transversal struggle. The image of the public thus begins to resemble the figure that Jean Bodin called the “uncommanded commander” (1992). In the end we must ask, what is impact of the agencies, users, and even the other constituents? If their work is neither a restitution of the autonomous museum nor a reform of the global icons, then what is their function? Unlike the neat stories of pre-​packaged engagement, the stories from MACBA could be seen as either institutional failures or successful experiments. If they are seen as a failure, it is only from the accountant’s logic of debit and credit. Success also has a dubious hangover, because the political apparatus of representative politics has made some gains by selectively incorporating aspects of “constituent practice”. The rise and fall of the coalition of the radical left-​ wing parties that formed Syriza in Greece is a glaring example. In the world of art institutions community engagement has been mainstreamed as a means of inoculating themselves against the wilder excesses of the other constituents. The rhetoric of participation and co-​production is everywhere, but scant effort is given to verifying whether the artistic propositions are matched with lived experiences (Hers & Douroux 2013: 96). There is also too much gleeful investment in rejecting experimentation. Both of these reactions only serve as a “denial of the new society” (Harney & Moten 2013: 41). Instead, let us look again at the “successes” and “failures” and find something as fecund as the rejection of a consumerist spectrum of choices and the refusal to participate in a fake democracy. However, we must also look forward as well, and acknowledge the extent to which “populist” ideas that were radical in 2001 have lost much of their bite as they are now increasingly operating under the sign of neoliberalism. A more sympathetic perspective on constituent power would accept the paradoxical power play: the agencies came to plunder, but they did not really take anything; they challenged the need for objectives, but did not feel compelled to sustain an agenda; they demanded new horizons, but did not feel obliged to venture out. They behaved liked monsters, idealists, delinquents, devotees, heretics, obsessives, and amateurs. But all these labels have the stink of redundancy! They are drenched in the social power that makes others feel like they are “good for nothing” (Fisher 2004).62 What counts most of all is that the agencies, users, and other constituents did not submit to dogma. All representative categories have their limits, and to think of the other constituents is another way of returning to the occlusions in language and

106  The constituents

Figure 5.3 Museum as Parliament, Year:  2018–​ ongoing, Artist:  Democratic Federation of North-​Syria and Studio Jonas Staal. Curated by Christiane Berndes and Steven ten Thije, collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Photograph:  Lotte Stekelenburg.

political discourse. Ultimately, there is no point in asking who are the other constituents, what is the function of a user, or from where do the agencies operate. The simple answer is, they do not come from one place, and they do not stick to any identity. Insofar as they are what they are through what they do, they are unrepresentable!63 It is what they do that counts, and if this leads to the invention of a method “that would allow people to gather together without the extinction of thought in each mind, they would will have produced a revolution in human history comparable to the discovery of fire, the wheel or the first tools” (Weil 2018: 37).

Notes 1 www.macba.cat/​en/​exhibition-​punk, accessed 10 September 2017. 2 At one level, Berger’s prophetic idea of transforming the museum into a “living school” has been materialized in the para-​social and pedagogic services generated by projects such as Ahmet Ogut’s The Silent University, that Vasif Kortun noted used the institutional space of the museum as a vessel for its realization. In this sense, the programme initiated by Ahmet Ogut is an example of a project that is a bridge between institutional critique and the constituent museum. According Ogut:

The constituents  107 The Silent University is a solidarity based knowledge exchange platform by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. It is led by a group of lecturers, consultants and research fellows. Each group is contributing to the programme in different ways which include course development, specific research on key themes as well as personal reflections on what it means to be a refugee and asylum seeker. This platform will be presented using the format of an academic programme. Since 2012 the Silent University has involved those that have had a professional life and academic training in their home countries, but are unable to use their skills or professional training due to a variety of reasons related to their status. Working together, the participants have developed lectures, discussions, events, resource archives and publications. The Silent University started initially in London in 2012 in collaboration with Delfina Foundation and Tate and later hosted by The Showroom. In 2013 the Silent University [was] established in the Sweden in collaboration with Tensta Konsthall and ABF Stockholm. In 2014 Silent University was also established in Hamburg, Germany initiated by Stadtkuratorin Hamburg in partnership with W3  –​ Werkstatt für internationale Kultur und Politik. Silent University Ruhr  –​ initiated by Impulse Theater Festival in coproduction with Ringlokschuppen Ruhr and Urbane Künste Ruhr –​opens it doors in Mülheim from June 2015 on. Silent University is also established in Amman, Jordan initiated by Spring Sessions from May 2015 on and in Athens since December 2015. The Silent University aims to address and reactivate the knowledge of the participants and make the exchange process mutually beneficial by inventing alternative currencies, in place of money or free voluntary service. The Silent University’s aim is to challenge the idea of silence as a passive state, and explore its powerful potential through performance, writing, and group reflection. These explorations attempt to make apparent the systemic failure and the loss of skills and knowledge experienced through the silencing process of people seeking asylum. (http://​thesilentuniversity.org, accessed 5 December 2016. See also Lind [2018: 114–​121]) 3 MIMA is an affiliate organization to L’Internationale. The conference also led to a major publication, which included some, but not all, of the presentations. See (Byrne et al. 2018). 4 www.visitmima.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​06/​Working-​with-​Constituents-​ Programme-​Schedule1.pdf, accessed 15 March 2017. 5 Three cheers for the Tate’s quest for a consensual voice! And full points to the MCA in Sydney for their outreach programme! However, there is much scepticism over the depth of such museological reforms and, in particular, the extent to which the rhetoric of inclusivity and diversity has permeated the institutional structures. For instance, in Ien Ang’s study of the engagement of diverse communities by the MCA in Sydney, it appears that the museum professionals want to have their cake and eat it too. By upholding their authority to proselytize the high points in contemporary practice, they promote themselves as gatekeepers for global culture and therefore as the natural partners to global sponsors, while also claiming to be rooted in the specific context and open to its diverse communities.

108  The constituents Ang’s study of the efforts of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Museum of Contemporary Art, both in Sydney, Australia, showed that while there was a deliberate attempt to engage communities that were normally at the margins of the institution’s attention, these institutions recognized the worthiness of outreach, participation, and engagement, yet these social principles, like the members from the communities, were not given equal status to the curatorial staff within the institutions. Hence, the principle of democratization in the shaping of a community programme was always subordinate to the institutional authority to control the definitions of what is art. The process of collaboration could not overtake the entrenched commitment for self-​reproduction and the function of the museum as a place for proselytizing over the form and meaning of art (Ang 2015: 211–​231). 6 http://​midstream.eipcp.net/​after-​audience, accessed 2 February 2019. 7 Email correspondence with Vasif Kortun, 5 September 2017. 8 The term “new institutionalism” was used in 2003 by Jonas Ekeberg to “refer to the phenomenon in art institutions by which they sought to develop new alignments with activist, political and cultural groups that were previously ignored” (2013: 51). 9 I think the work done during an entire decade by Macba was extremely important in this sense and it manifested itself in different moments, beyond the episode of the Agencias, especially in the work done with different associations of the Besós area in Barcelona, as well as with queer collectives (Paul Preciado worked with us organizing different workshops), anti-​psychiatry experiences in different hospitals, etc. Email correspondence with Manuel Borja-​Villel, 27 September 2019. 10 www.visitmima.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​06/​Working-​with-​Constituents-​ Programme-​Schedule1.pdf, accessed 15 March 2017. 11 www.visitmima.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​06/​Working-​with-​Constituents-​ Programme-​Schedule1.pdf, accessed 15 March 2017. 12 www.visitmima.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​06/​Working-​with-​Constituents-​ Programme-​Schedule1.pdf, accessed 15 March 2017. 13 www.visitmima.com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2016/​06/​Working-​with-​Constituents-​ Programme-​Schedule1.pdf, accessed 15 March 2017. 14 November Paynter, interview, Istanbul, 25 August 2016. 15 Email correspondence with Vasif Kortun, 5 September 2017. 16 The rhetoric claim of “ownership” that is now frequently used in the public sector masks complex legal and structural frameworks. As Vasif Kortun noted, the implications and consequences of this demand are far reaching. “We don’t actually own anything. We are also temporary workers at the institution” (Email correspondence, 5 September 2017). 17 Manuel Borja-​Villel, interview, Madrid, 2 September 2016. 18 Email correspondence with Jorge Ribalta, 16 September 2019. 19 www.macba.cat/​en/​exhibition-​antagonisms, accessed 20 February 2018. 20 www.macba.cat/​en/​exhibition-​art-​utopia, accessed 20 February 2018. 21 Given the diversity of languages and political contexts amongst the partners in L’Internationale, any concept is bound to prompt a range of responses. Each time a concept such as “constituent” is debated and even accepted, it is a given that its application will vary according to the context in which it is used. Hence, Tonina Cerda, Head of Public Programs at MACBA, argues that the concept of constituency had to be cannibalized before it could be adopted:  “About 15 or 16  years ago MACBA started to work with communities. At that time Manolo Borja was

The constituents  109 director, Jorge Ribalta was head of public programme, and Marcelo Exposito also had a prominent role in the Museum. The key term we used was Agencies. There is no equivalent word to constituencies in Catalan, and it sounds a bit like a parliamentarian term. The term “agencies” was adopted because we wanted to be part of social action, to be in the reality of the city and not as an enclosed and separate bubble”. (Tonina Cerda interview, Barcelona, 25 September 2016) Manuel Borja-​Villel also unpicks the paradoxical implications of the concept of the constituent: The idea of constituents has changed as it has been discussed by the partners in L’Internationale. It basically refers to the idea of letting others have a part in the decision-​making. However, in the case of L’Internationale this is a paradox, because the constituents are realized always in a local context. As a consequence it is not possible to move in a linear manner from the centre of the confederation. It must be developed from each community, and as a consequence what L’Internationale brings to the surface is the variety of local constituents. Finding axes or frames to link these constituents is our challenge. This is what we call museo situado. This in itself will not happen organically. We must find ways to link together the constituents that are associated with one institution to those of another. Or alternatively, we have the possibility that the cross-​linking between the constituents in different contexts will also compel a new axis to be developed with the institutions. (Manuel Borja-​Villel, interview, Madrid, 2 September 2016) At the Van Abbe Museum, Charles Esche and Annie Fletcher (15 September 2016) discuss how the concept of the constituent museum appears to have been grafted with earlier experiments in developing a “caucus”: CE: In Cork I  worked with Annie Fletcher and the National Sculpture Factory. Rather than using the funds to commission a monumental artwork, we were more conscious of the deep sense of isolation in the city. We wanted to stimulate the dialogue between artists in the city and with artists from other parts of the world. So we invited artists not to do works in Cork but to work with the people of Cork, to make on going connections rather a one-​off project. AF: The idea of the caucus draws from the notion of artists as citizens who are involved in an assembly that works on propositions, elects representatives, and even defines policies. The etymology of caucus is to gauge, to measure up a space, to take the temperature of a moment in time. It is both spatial and temporal measuring of the points of reference, and an attempt to gain a sense of a wider whole. So we set up the caucus as a sort of summer school, an intensive four-​week-​long process of exchange and engagement with local and international artists, thinkers, and activists. It sought to develop affinities between different groups rather than to bring experts that could teach locals. The exchange was meant to be reciprocal, and neither the invited guests nor the local participants were encouraged to be spectators but to take part of a collective process for rethinking how the local and the world were intertwined. The whole process was dedicated to producing a wider sense of citizenship.

110  The constituents In the process, we would often use the jargon that city officials use to promote economic development, social cohesion, and cultural engagement in an effort to give this official discourse an artistic twist. I think constituency is the big unknown. In Spain they used the word “agencies”, but this doesn’t resonate in English, but then maybe the word “constituency” doesn’t resonate in Spanish. So maybe there need to be different words because we all operate in different contexts. Working here in the Netherlands and having done the Cork Caucus project, there are unique challenges in each context. If I  were to explain the methodology of the caucus, what I [would] really stress is this idea of trying to build affinity. For a long time I  worked with Sarah Pierce where we literally looked at the affinity between activist groups. You know these methodologies of building affinity groups like from Act Up and all that. There’s like rules somehow to build affinity. And I think those ideas are really interesting, like how do you establish affinity? I don’t think museums normally establish affinity at all. The emphasis is building a space for individualistic spectatorship. This has nothing to do with affinity, which is always collective and affective. The museum is now also a public space. However, there is a deep inadequacy of our art institutions to operate as civic institutions. The whole behaviour, the whole professional behaviour needs to be changed, as what the caucus tries to do in, say, a period of four weeks is escalate that other behaviour. Often we go back to our default position, unfortunately. The presumption is that museums are still holders of complete works [and] the only way you can start responding to art is if the artwork is already finished. Museums are also terrified of misuse and conflict right. They manage these things very well. So when you are actually suggesting ideas like affinity, agency, and equality, then lots of other power plays come up too. For example, one of the things that happened in Cork, which I was really disappointed about, was the anxiety over performance, and the sense that the locals could not compete with the internationals. I kept pushing at that point, so what we did, every single day in the four weeks, we had two moments of public display in the school. So there was lots of different discussion and things. So then at one point they reduced the slots to six slots in the whole thing, you know. It was so distressing, because the whole point was not to produce that kind of competition; it was to produce affinity. But actually what was happening was a residue of this deep sense of inadequacy, this whole colonial inadequacy. As an Irish person, I  recognize this, but I also recognized that there was also a desperate desire by some of the men to be validated by the visiting males. All this stuff, and some of these effects were not positive. You keep working with it, but can’t just leap over it. (Charles Esche and Annie Fletcher, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016) A similar contested logic applies to my own proposed concepts. As Zdenka Badovinac points out: The use of frames will almost be paradoxical. They will not be fixed and definitive, but more flexible and porous, allowing for terms to be applied in the specific ways that make sense in their own context. To an extent the frames must be made anew in each circumstance. I would prefer to see the frame as a joint. (Zdenka Badovinac, interview, Ljubljana, 28 August 2016)

The constituents  111 These semantic differences are important because the different interpretations can lead to different actions. It should also be noted that my own limitations with the diverse languages at play within L’Internationale were a significant barrier to my discursive engagement. 22 Kortun noted that the term “agencies” was also preferred to constituents, and that the term was adopted at SALT in much the same way as it was defined in Spanish:  “Agencies refers to bodies that maintain their integrity as external. In constituency, the clear divide between the internal and the external gets quite fuzzy. It is precisely that very moment of space where interesting things happen” (Email correspondence, 5 September 2017). It is clear that while the two terms are not exchangeable and analogues to each other, they do seem coexist in shared conceptual terrain. 23 Manuel Borja-​Villel recalls this period very differently. It was not so much a matter of struggle over resources, but of “mutual interpellation” (Email correspondence with Manuel Borja-​Villel, 26 September 2019). It is also fair to say that the impact of these experiments has been profound and wide reaching in the museum sector. At the Reina Sofia, Borja-​Villel has continued to work with activist groups and sought to open the spaces for dissent and critique. This included a series of shows and actions that culminated in the exhibition “Really Useful Knowledge” (2018a: 179–​181). See also Jesus Carillo on the formation of the Public Activities Department at the Reina Sofia and its collaboration with the Subtramas collective and the curatorial collective WHW (What, How and for Whom) (Carillo 2018: 183–​195). 24 Tonina Cerda, interview, Barcelona, 7 September 2016. 25 During the Constituent Museum Conference at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), 2016, the exhibition in the gallery included a work of art that was text printed onto the gallery wall by Liam Gillick, which was in part a response to the British Home Office’s mandate for sovereign border control in an age of global mobility, and also addressed the impact and complicity it brings to bear on art institutions: “If all relations were to reach equilibrium then this building would dissolve” www.visitmima.com/​whats-​on/​single/​if-​all-​relationships-​were-​to-​ reach-​equilibrium-​then-​this-​building-​would-​dissolve/​, accessed 1 December 2016. 26 Teresa Grandas, interview, Barcelona, 7 September 2016. 27 Sonia Lopez, interview, Barcelona, 7 September 2016. 28 My aim here is to avoid moralistic claims and finger-​pointing exercises. Tensions in working with external groups and activists have at times captured wider attention, and as a consequence, much of the public discourse has been polarized and unhelpful:  in 2008 the curators of the Sao Paulo Biennial proposed to use the second floor void as an open plan venue for community engagement. However, when 40 graffiti artists entered the space and began tagging, the administrators called security to remove the “vandals”. http://​x-​traonline.org/​article/​28th-​sao-​ paulo-​bienal-​in-​living-​contact/​. In 2011, the Executive Director of New  York Artists Space declared his sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street movement, but within 24 hours engaged a private security firm to evict the occupiers from the gallery. http://​observer.com/​2011/​10/​group-​occupies-​artists-​space-​in-​soho/​. In 2014, when it was revealed that the Chairman of the Board of the Sydney Biennale was also a director of a company that was involved in the construction of offshore detention centres for refugees, 28 artists threatened to boycott the event. The Chairman resigned, four artists refused to re-​enter the exhibition, and the

112  The constituents divisions between the director and the majority of the artists remained an open sore. www.discipline.net.au/​biennale-​of-​sydney-​2014-​and-​transfield/​, accessed 20 May 2018. 29 Zdenka Badonivac, interview, Ljubljana, 28 August 2016. See also Glossary of Common Knowledge: http://​glossary.mg-​lj.si/​referential-​fields/​constituencies 30 Adela Zeleznik, interview, Ljubljana, 29 August 2016. 31 Borut Vogelnik and Roman Uranjek, interview, Ljubljana, 30 August 2016. 32 Charles Esche and Steven ten Thije, interview, Eindhoven, 16 August 2016. 33 Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 16 August 2016. 34 The artist Koen van den Broek did so through an exhibition of works not only in M HKA’s collection but also from his personal network, and the other collections in L’Internationale (Koen van den Broek, interview, Antwerp, 13 August 2016). 35 Email correspondence with Bart De Baere, 28 August 2019: For years now we have been following a series of strategies to hand over part of our presentation capacity (and therewith our public identity). This happens in punctual ways in the main exhibition and collection presentation programmes. The van den Broeck was one of a long series running from 2002 up till 2011 –​and then continued in a different way geared at our Vrielynck precinema and cinema hardware collection –​in which artists were invited to find their own relation to the collection, in this way gradually shaping an image of that collection. Quite extreme in its decisions, effects and gained understanding, I dare say. www.muhka.be/​en/​programme/​exhibitions/​ interventions. In the past five years the most radical spaces for that within M HKA were the INBOX space serving to publicly present points of attention felt needed by the artist field www.muhka.be/​en/​programme/​exhibitions/​inbox, surprising us with some of the most precise and important exhibitions in M HKA, notwithstanding the small scale, and the Lodgers program, that equally made a difference, www.muhka.be/​en/​programme/​exhibitions/​lodgers 36 Bart De Baere, interview, Antwerp, 12 September 2016. 37 Email correspondence, 13 September 2019. 38 Bart De Baere, interview, Antwerp, 12 September 2016. The philosopher Isabell Lorey also argued that the dynamic of constituent process is neither constrained by a pre-​existing constitution, nor seeking to substitute it with a new fixed code, but rather it flows as it learns from its own experiments and “concatenates with a new understanding of constituent power” (2017: 172). 39 Email correspondence with Bart De Baere, 28 August 2019. This is now embedded in M KHA policy. As a mediator between people and art, society and culture, M HKA wants to reflect on what is essentially connecting people, amongst one another and with M HKA. While starting up the cultural heritage sector there was a reference back to Edmund Burke, who stated that the social contract is not only drawn up between the living, but between those who are still alive, those who already passed away and those who still have to be born. The people who live now are only a cross section, a moment in a longer story. 4 0 Bart De Baere, interview, Antwerp, 12 September 2016. 41 Pascal Gielen, interview, Antwerp, 13 September 2016. 42 https://​saltonline.org/​media/​files/​192.pdf, accessed 1 June 2019.

The constituents  113 4 3 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Email correspondence with Vasif Kortun, 5 September 2017. Meric Oner, interview, Istanbul, 26 August 2016. Email correspondence with Vasif Kortun, 5 September 2017. Basak Caka, interview, Istanbul, 25 August 2016. Email correspondence with Vasif Kortun, 5 September 2017. Can Altay, interview, Istanbul, 26 August 2016. Jorge Ribalta, interview, Barcelona, 7 September 2016. Jorge Ribalta, interview, Barcelona, 7 August 2016. Skype interview with Mabel Tapia, Paris, 3 September 2016: The distinctive force of the constituent is most evident in the way they have sought to use the institutions to find ways to preserve archives “in situ” as a kind of “body” in order to reflect the logic and form of the artist’s corpus, and to digitize copies that can then be circulated to the public. This “body” is often not organized in any conventional archival format, but there is nevertheless an idiosyncratic logic that weaves itself in the way the artist has gathered and assembled the material. To move and reclassify this work is to do violence to this artistic gesture of inhabitation. To keep this ambience of artistic archive alive in its own terms, or at least to slowly learn what elements can be sacrificed is one of the aims Archivos en red.

5 2 November Paynter, interview, Istanbul, 25 August 2016. 53 www.youtube.com/​watch?v=nc_​XIdhNenk, accessed 10 September 2017. 54 The project Picasso in Palestine (2011) was a triumph in international collaboration, https:// ​ vanabbemuseum.nl/​ e n/​ p rogramme/​ p rogramme/​ p icasso-​ i n-​ p alestine/​ , accessed 1 February 2019, whereas the exhibition The Potosi Principle was constrained by the legal loan contracts and political anxieties over repatriation of prized colonial artworks, www.darkmatter101.org/​site/​2013/​11/​18/​ interview- ​ w ith- ​ t he- ​ c urators- ​ o f- ​ t he- ​ exhibition-​ p rincipio-​ p otosi-​ d as-​ p otosi-​ prinzip-​the-​potosi-​principle-​on-​the-​mobility-​of-​colonial-​baroque-​paintings- ​ between-​europe-​and-​the-​americas/​, accessed 12 January 2019. 55 www.museoreinasofia.es/​en/​exhibitions/​remy-​zaugg, accessed 1 December 2016. 56 In 2017 Moderna galerija already had a part time working contract with the migrants, who started their traineeship as guards at the Heritage of 1989. Case Study: The Second Yugoslav Documents Exhibition at the Moderna galerija. In 2018 they established a museum café called + Kantina MSUM, a space that provides migrants with an opportunity to work and utilize their knowledge in preparing traditional dishes. +Kantina also builds social networks in the wider Metelkova area, and is relatively independent, organizing its own program of events. In the exhibition Heritage of 1989. Case Study:  The Second Yugoslav Documents Exhibition initiated a series of workshops where female asylum seekers from Iran and Afganistan were making embroideries together with the local women, migrants, who arrived to Slovenia from Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s. Those workshops were connected to Azra Akšamija’s projects Palympsest 1989 and Digesting Dayton. The idea of inviting women of different generations, ethnic and cultural backgrounds to socialise, exchange their experiences and do something together originates in their belief that by creating things the participants are reminded they have power. Especially the female asylum seekers, coming mostly

114  The constituents from patriarchal societies and taking care of small children, have considerably less opportunities for a social integration in the new environment than men. (Email correspondence with Adela Zelznik and Zdenka Badovinac, 9 September 2019) 5 7 58 59 60 61

Tonina Cerda, interview, Barcelona, 7 September 2016. Bart De Baere, interview, Antwerp, 12 September 2016. Sonya Lopez, interview, Barcelona, 7 September 2016. Marcelo Exposito, interview, Madrid, 3 September 2016. Email correspondence with Vasif Kortun, 5 September 2017. A similar view can be found in Gerald Raunig’s view on instituent practice. In this mode, the collective neither grabs power, once and for all, nor locks all the rules of conduct into a constitution. Instead, Raunig claims that “it goes through two temporalities that also make up its two components: on the one hand, the component of what is eventual in the instituting; on the other, the component of sustainability, of insisting, of always newly starting again” (2013: 176). 62 Mark Fisher also made the following caustic remark on neoliberal populism: “Treating people as if they were intelligent is, we have been led to believe, ‘elitist’, whereas treating them as if they were stupid is ‘democratic’ ” (2009: 17). 63 Or put another way, can the other constituents speak? which of course, is a refrain on Gayatri Spivak’s famous critique: Can the subaltern speak? (1988).

Chapter 6

Art without museums

When Ruangrupa, an art collective based in Jakarta, produce exhibitions their objective is not primarily or even ultimately to display an image. Their exhibitions are complex environments that combine performance, social gatherings, lectures, publications, and screenings. Their format resembles a hybrid conjunction of a mini-​festival and a mobile art school. Similarly, the places where they work and assemble are difficult to pin down. Their studio spaces look like an overwhelmed office with desks bulging under the weight of manuscripts, lunch leftovers, boxes of clothes, audio cassette tapes, DVDs, sellotape dispensers, books, and vinyl albums. The adjoining courtyard resembles a busy market store at a provincial bus stop.1 When they organize events, images and experiences are embedded inside a complex web of sociality and knowledge production. As people come and go, the formations shift and fold. Speculative conversations on religious and political systems for living with strangers are mixed with workshops and singing sessions. Where is the focus point in this assemblage? What is the frame that delimits concentration? Is the aim of Ruangrupa to create a visual and sensory experience at a time when we no longer experience images as discrete objects? Or, does this assemblage of objects, practices, and images open our sensory, visual, and cognitive faculties to a more ambient awareness of the functions of the visual, sonic, haptic, and olfaction? Furthermore, if we are to take seriously the agency of constituents, is not the first task to rid ourselves of the stultifying hierarchies of authoritative interpretation, which for millennia have embedded the fascination with the mystery of the image in a system that keeps the public in a state of ignorance? In short: “Who is the expert?” “What is the difference between the user and the author in a collective work?” The challenge for L’Internationale is therefore not only confined to the conduct within and across institutions, but also to their capacity to emancipate the museum from its bondage to collecting and presenting objects in an authorial manner.2 The questions and issues arising from the practice of collectives like Ruangrupa cut across all the thematic concerns of this book. Ruangrupa was formed in 2000, and their name literally means “visual space”. Working with

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festivals in Indonesia and around the world, they produce workshops and publish a journal. Their events are loosely structured, and even when there is an exhibition, it does not usually include work that is made for the museum.3 Their activities, based on what David Teh calls a “karaoke method”, baffle the museum’s genealogical categories for collection and classification (Teh 2012). They are fully integrated within the global art discourse, yet they also draw from traditional concepts and customs. They give emphasis to noongkrong, informal chatting; gotong royong, communal self-​help; sanggar, a meeting place for apprentices and masters; rapal, assemblies for leadership debates; and lumbung, a method of distributing surpluses (Vanhoe 2016). Their motivation for enabling other ways for people to “hang out” and “do stuff ” is not simply a consequence of local infrastructure deficits in the Indonesian arts context; rather, it is a spur for the coming museums of the commons. This example of embedding visual forms within specific cultural practices and sociopolitical assemblages reorganizes, what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (2004) calls the “regime of the visual and sensible” and thereby demands new interpretative frameworks.4 It is a timely reminder that aesthetic experience never occurs in a vacuum. Rancière pointed out that art is always part of a regime that organizes our sensory perception and normative judgements, but it is also part of a process of reorganizing a regime, cracking it open from the inside, as it were (Rancière 2009: 48). In this final chapter I adopt Rancière’s typology; however, my aim is to go further into the contemporary modes for making meaning. In particular, I will pay attention to the shifts in the spectator’s position in relation to art. In schematic terms, it could be said that the traditional spectator stood before a work of art. A modern subject was at times invited to move with and around the work, whereas the contemporary participant is drawn in to co-​produce it. My aim is not only to map these shifts but also contribute to L’Internationale’s aim to “demodernize” the conceptual frameworks that would otherwise “imprison” art and ideas in “zombie forms” and “dead archives”.5 However, there is another agenda at stake, and that is the regrounding of the realm of aesthetic experience. My wider aim is to rethink aesthetics, not just as a category for explaining creation but also as a space for the democratization of sensory understanding. This will entail a departure from the absurd relegation of the common sense of ordinary people as a static and uneducated category, and an opening up to the manifold ways in which aesthetic experience is part of the perpetual exchange between art and life. In the context of collective aesthetic experiences it will also require a dislodging of the vertical hierarchies of critical authority. To clarify this shift in meaning-​ making, I  will outline three distinct headings:  religious icons, autonomous images, and ambient assemblages. While I can identify distinct historical periods in which the icon dominated, and assert that the emergence of the autonomous image draws on the Renaissance, and pinpoint that the ambient assemblage would not be possible

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without the advances in digital communication, it is also clear that these headings coexist in the contemporary context, and that the presentation of this typology cannot be seen as a successive progression, whereby one either transcends or excludes the other. This chapter will give specific focus to the impact of artistic collectives and multisensorial artistic practices. I will argue that the heading of ambient assemblage helps qualify the nexus between spectatorship and participation. I will also focus on the writing of the Russian theorist Boris Groys, not only because he was quick to identity to significance of collectives, but also to draw from his perspicacious analysis of the blurring between traditional distinctions. Throughout the mapping of the function of the image and the position of the spectator is the problem of perspective. Under my heading of ambient assemblage there is an account of the process of diffusion and contingency in contemporary modes of awareness. This problem is everywhere in contemporary life. It is not just visitors to museums that are grappling with sensory overload. As noted by Carlo Rovelli, the renowned physicist of loop theory, everything is seen from the moving middle. There is no special vantage point like the humancentric perspective invented in the Renaissance. On the contrary: “we observe the universe from within it, interacting with a minuscule portion of the innumerable variables of the cosmos. What we see is a blurred image” (Rovelli 2018:  134). Blurring occurs because of the rapidity of interactions and the confusion generated by conflicting sources of information. Art that is captured under the heading of ambient assemblage takes blurring as the condition of vision. To grasp both the distinctiveness of ambient assemblage and the ghost-​like continuities of the religious and autonomous headings in art, let me make a brief outline of their distinctive characteristics.

The religious icon: the supplicant The American art historian Thomas Crow was, from a Eurocentric perspective, correct when he argued that the Renaissance did not spell the end of “idolatry” (2017: 13). Against the materialist grain of art history, he proposes that a theological process perdures in the imaginary of contemporary artists, and to ignore the presence of religious beliefs is, in his mind, to confine critical attention to playing with shadows. It is true that in both founding and contemporary figures in art history, from Ernst Gombrich to Boris Groys, the status of the icon has not only remained uncertain, but it has also haunted the analysis of spectatorship and the wider framework of aesthetics. Idealist theories of creation have all but vanished in the contemporary discourse on art. However, it is also true that the dominant materialist perspectives have not been able, as Janet Wolff conceded, to fully answer the questions of beauty and artistic merit (1981: 7). Despite the persistence of streams of religious belief in artistic practice, the pre-​modern structure of religiosity that sustained the icon has not survived

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in whole. It is obvious that even when people pay their respects to overtly religious works, like the paintings by Mark Rothko, they do not come into a museum in order to find either spiritual salvation or practical amelioration for, say, their broken toe. In the past, devotees believed that the icon was a spiritual device and not the mere material product of the artist.6 The icon was not just a static representation but an embodiment of the divine and therefore had the capacity to do miraculous things:  it could move, speak, weep, and bleed. Hans Belting, the art historian who chronicled this history with the greatest acumen, tells us that when the icons of saints were brought into the public gaze, it was believed that the image was made with the cooperation of the saint. The icon was grasped as being authentic not only because it was an accurate representation, but also because the depiction was meant to convey the saint’s preferred appearance (Belting 1994: 4). Hence, the icon is sovereign, and the worshipper must care for it like a living subject and a spiritual force. The worshipper seeks to touch it and be touched by it. In this communion with the icon it is hoped that the grace that resides in it will be passed on to the devotee via the artist’s rendition. It is through the regime of the religious icon that the bond with the divine is realized. Belting stresses that, in these instances, dialogue with the image is established not according to the principles of verisimilitude, but by a transfer of psychic activity. The perception of signs of life in an inanimate object, and the belief that the communion with a visual likeness to the divine figure is not just an aesthetic experience but rather part of the spiritual movement towards the experience of the cosmic whole. Hence, the role of the icon, especially when it is embedded in ritual and collective practices that separate the individual from the everyday, is to convey the sensory plasticity between perception and the experience of being part of, and to be alike with the divine. By communing with the mysteries, the icon mobilizes the paradoxical conjunctions of the living and the dead, the terrestrial and the celestial, motion and stillness, and thereby establishes a possibility to be both in the present and with the eternal. While Belting stresses that the dialogue with the icon is not defined in terms of a critical interpretation or an appreciation of verisimilitude, he is nevertheless presenting us with features of psychic transfer that are still recognizable. Long ago, Johan Huizinga reminded us that the Middle Ages in Europe, dominated as they were by the “extreme saturation of the religious atmosphere, and a marked tendency of thought to embody itself in images”, was also a time in which great efforts were made to regulate the proliferation and guard against the promiscuity of meanings that could be attached to an icon (1955:  153). He described the struggle to preserve the proper hierarchy to not only avoid being enraptured by commercialized relics, but also remind devotees that they were meant to adore God but only venerate saints. Hence, in order to ensure that the distinction between ceremonial piety and the banalities of everyday life were not blurred, the church arranged the appearance of images to follow a strict logic, and required of its priests to instruct the

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“simple-​minded” people of their correct meaning. At first glance, such hierarchies and beliefs appear obsolete. Yet, the idea that the contemporary visitor has a dialogue with the artwork, is moved by it, and even has a life-​ transforming experience is not that far from the contemporary claims on the power of art. And surprisingly, neither has the hierarchy that separates art from craft nor the elevated pedagogic function of curators and critics perished.

The autonomous image: “we bend the knee no more” During the Renaissance the theological paradigm that defined the status of the image and the role of the devotee was decentred. Visual meaning was increasingly related to the new rationalism, circulating in the ambit of secularized cultural demands and interpreted through perspectival rules. The social authority of the image was shaped by its capacity to tell a specific ethical story or depict scenes with naturalistic realism. The function of the spectator was derived from a position of learning and emulating that occurred through an intellectual process of recollection, contemplation, reflection, and interpretation. Spectators adopted the role of witnesses and interpreters. Rather than being vessels that received the divine spirit, communion with the image was overtaken by communication. It required a back-​and-​forth effort of decoding and interpreting, going beneath the surface, and uncovering the hidden meanings. As a consequence, a new interpretative model was introduced  –​ one that became part of a reflection on the world and conveyed the existential narratives of a community of human beings. Hans Belting summed up this radical shift very neatly: Aesthetic mediation allows a different use of images, about which artist and beholder can agree between themselves. Subjects seize power over the image and seek through art to apply their metaphoric concept of the world. The image, henceforth produced according to the rules of art and deciphered in terms of them, presents itself to the beholder as an object of reflection. Form and content renounce their unmediated meaning in favor of the mediated meaning of aesthetic experience and concealed argumentation. (1994: 16) The communication revolution was not a smooth transition from devotion to contemplation. As modern artists experimented with the innovations in optics and aligned themselves with revolutionary movements, spectators found themselves as either victims of “shock” tactics, or students in a journey of perceptual transformation. During the early part of the twentieth century the Dadaists in Zurich, and much later, with the Happenings in New York, artists staged performances that aimed to shock their audiences out of the

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seats of pure spectatorship and liberate themselves from the “hang-​ups” of bourgeois patriarchal conduct. The images, objects, and performances were meant to offer a widening of the imagination; a clarification that opened up possibilities; and a discovery of insights that deepened understanding. At times, these educative experiences were combined with aggressive acts of confrontation, which were intended to inspire sufficient rage and indignation that the spectator would rebel against authority, unzip hypocrisy, and demand the truth. The introduction of another relatively simple idea  –​collage, the assembly of disjointed fragments  –​which had an immense influence on cinema, literature, music, and design, was not only expressive of the dynamic ruptures of this epoch, but also one of the most powerful methods in the toolkit for highlighting the partial nature of spectatorship (Willett 2018). Spectators were expected to unshackle themselves from a presumed correspondence between life and the image, and discover how the habituation of our senses, the perpetuation of conceptual bearings, and inherited social hierarchies constrained both the understanding and production of new sensory realities. Despite these radical changes, Ernst Gombrich noted that art history had bent itself out of joint by focusing almost entirely on the problem of representing space. When time and motion was addressed, it had to be frozen into a punctum temporis –​an instant point, or rather, flow had to be captured in the space of a scene (Gombrich 1982: 42). Motion was central to modernity and modernism, but it baffled the modern humanist disciplines. The position from which knowledge was gained was still stuck in the role of the traditional spectator detached from the work of art and equipped with a sovereign, objective, and omniscient gaze. By contrast, the modern spectator in the field of art and culture was flung into whirling force fields. In the midst of flows, spectators were expected to reassemble the fragments into a new narrative that was partial and incomplete. For instance, with the developments in minimalism and conceptual art there was no singular point that determined the perspective, and, as Sol LeWitt admitted, meaning making was uncoupled from authorial intention: “The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others” (No 25 of the Sentences on Conceptual Art, LeWitt 2003, 850). The challenge of revelation through the negation of narrative content was taken to further extremes in conceptual art. The communicative function of art was distilled into the most direct expression of an idea. By eliminating symbolic content, art became a “poetic instrument of communication rather than as an object of contemplation” (Groys 2016:  130). However, as Boris Groys also pessimistically claimed, in the absence of an aesthetic pedagogy that can rein in sensory experience, the realm of the aesthetic simply hovers and then dissipates (2016: 124). One key marker of the modern period was the emergence of the artist as entrepreneur. As artists could now produce objects that were commercially valued by the marketplace, their careers were no longer exclusively confined

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to religious and state patronage. However, the ability of art to circulate like any other commodity also meant that the artist had to navigate the matrix of freedom and alienation, which according to Groys, also entailed that the artist was increasingly at “the mercy of the public’s good opinion” (2009: 20). In this context, the interpretative framing was recentred around the individual’s capacity to decode symbols and produce an inner narrative. Yet, the immersive experience that was typical of the regime of the religious icon was not totally abandoned in the new interpretative modes in the regime of the autonomous image. The striking force of the icon, like the narratives embedded in the autonomous image, both rely on the persistence of a belief that art was composed of mysterious elements. Under both headings there remains an insistence that not everything in art is instantly comprehensible. Charles Esche goes so far as to argue that:  “in the current condition there is little difference between visually worshipping a Carl Andre sculpture, or praying to a Jesus figurine”.7 It not only requires a devotional stance but also a mediator who can make the mystery of art explicable to the public. A critique of the idea of autonomy for the arts has been a defining feature of Charles Esche’s curatorial career. Esche was born in Manchester and grew up in the defining years of the punk cry: “No Future”, and Margaret Thatcher’s mantra: “there is no such thing as society”. After a brief period at Kettle’s Yard Gallery in Cambridge, Esche made his mark at Tramway Gallery in Glasgow where he played an instrumental role in promoting a generation of young artists who managed to bypass the monopoly of the London art market and establish new cultural networks in Europe. In 2000, Esche took up the role of Director of the Rooseum Centre for Contemporary Art, Malmo. In many ways Sweden was the antithesis to Thatcher’s United Kingdom. However, for Esche the grounding of the arts within the welfare state was neither solid nor sustainable. During his four-​year period in Malmo, he commenced the large-​scale exhibition and research initiative “Whatever Happened to Social Democracy?” (2005). The idea of autonomy for art was premised on providing a space for art that was exempt from the dictates of the market as well as being out of meddling influence of the church and state.8 But from what royal court, church, or vaulted storage unit is art demanding emancipation? The freedom of the artist is an important value, but it is also a means to something else, “not a goal in itself ” (ten Thije 2017:  68). Autonomy only has meaning when it is paired against a condition of subjugation. For Esche, the idea of autonomy for the arts was dependent on the sustainability of the post–​Second World War compromise between the social welfarist model and state socialism. Thus, even before Esche joined the Van Abbemuseum in 2004, he had already come to the conclusion that economic globalization and the new forms of migration would render obsolete the space of autonomy for the arts.9 Esche also rejected the historical justification of autonomy:

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I think the problem goes way back to the elevation of the single point perspective in the Renaissance and its relationship to the condition of enlightenment. This focuses on one privileged individual and one privileged sense, rather than a collective kind of perception that you get in public space. Following on from this is the problem of one linear, modern time in which you experience, then assess, then emerge more enlightened. This is how the museum works.10 Esche also claimed that the idea of autonomy was premised on a history of “white supremacy”.11 His critique of autonomy draws on postcolonial authors like Eduardo Galeano who have condemned European cultural narcissism –​“Europe looked in the mirror and saw the world. Beyond that lay nothing” (Galeano 2009: 111), as well as being forged in alliance with Bart de Baere’s declaration of M HKA as a “Eurasian” museum (Kreuger & De Baere 2018: 112). Esche feared that failing to dispel the illusion of “art for art’s sake” would render museums as “zombies”.12 Esche’s argument against the perpetuation of a life support system for autonomous art, and his turn towards socially engaged art would also take him to rethink the relationship between the museum and the human sensorium: in the era of modern art the privileged sense was the eye. The body as a whole was absent, smells were absent, sounds were absent. This is a challenge because an art museum is an institution dedicated to the retina and from which other senses have usually been excluded.13 He emphasized that this way of seeing disconnected the critical gaze from all the other sensory forms of appreciation and it perpetuated a hierarchical structure of decoding signs. It reinforced the stigmatic order that confined the “ordinary” viewer to merely seeing the surface, and prompted Esche to propose a demodern agenda for art. However, there is no consensus on this “demodern” agenda in L’Internationale, and considerable resistance against it in the wider art world. Art historians are, for instance, split between those who favour a renewal of the discursive turn, and others who insist on a return to a theological regime as a “deus ex machina”.14 This defensive retreat is not the only option. Esche demands a radical alternative. He claims that the idea of art operating in a “tolerated enclosure” and the “autonomous spectator” are no longer “valid”, and that they only persist “because global capitalism has not got round to eliminating it yet”.15 At the same time, it must be evident to anyone with a grasp of historical change that in 2017 the world lacks the collective, common platforms adequate to deal with the multiple ethical, aesthetic and political questions that arise today. The forms of representative democracy developed in the nineteenth century are falling apart. The risk and the hope is that the

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museum as one of the few functional public sites left for those much-​ needed common platforms, existing within culture, more than within the given political and economic fields, will serve as the space for a public forum where the idea of the artistic and the educational can flourish. (Esche 2017: 22) The idea of the autonomous image was oriented by the principles of perspective and the discovery of the laws of optics. It enabled artists to align pictorial representations with the “laws” of perception, and it produced a new correspondence between the aesthetic means of realism and the “laws” of nature. It granted artist’s greater control over their subject and grounded their claim that creative freedom was a product of their personal imagination. The image was important not because it was a fragment from the celestial world, but due to its ability to convey a correspondence between an artist’s inner world and their view out into the terrestrial world. The agency of the artist was celebrated in the age of individualism, but equally the window into his or her soul was valued because it revealed a new horizon of possibility in this secular world. The image was thus not only viewed through a frame, but the frame was also crucial in directing mental concentration. With the invention of perspective, a new kind of hermeneutics was brought forward. The painter created a scene and a narrative, and the viewer analysed the elements and made sense of it by developing a story. By focusing on the construction of a story, the viewer took the role of a witness to events and deduced from them a specific lesson, thus forming an abstract understanding. The viewer was no longer in communion with the divine, but a more down-​to-​earth critic that analysed a scene. The function of analysis was to uncover the hidden meanings, to go beneath the surface and towards the essence of the message. Along with these new modes of witnessing, evaluation, and interpretation comes the institution of the museum, and the appearance of the art historian –​the figure that replaces the priest and becomes the expert who can explain the mysteries of the image. As I have argued throughout this book, this separation of the hardware from the software has been overtaken. The foundations for the autonomous image are sundered. At best, the belief in the autonomous image is a residue of an obsolete social system. However, what remains alive within a residue is, as Vasif Kortun reminds us “unpredictable” (2018b: 309).

The ambient assemblage and post-​s pectatorship If we recall the imbrication of spectatorship and participation that arise from projects led by artist collectives like Ruangrupa, then we can now sense the inadequacy and limitations of the religious and autonomous headings. In many contemporary projects, the image is not just embedded in a scene, and the scenography is not just a dramatization of a special moment in everyday

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life. For instance, Liam Gillick acknowledged the dependency of his artworks on public participation when he compared their impact to the role of the light in a fridge: it only comes on if you open the door. In this scenario the spectator is not just a detached viewer, but rather enters into the scene as a participant to pick up and move things, to be uplifted and moved through their actions and interactions. The characteristics and challenges that arise from an ambient assemblage can be witnessed in Shamiyaana  –​Food for Thought:  Thought for Change (2016–​2017), a recent artwork by Rasheed Araeen at Documenta XIV in Athens. The art is a tent where people were invited to share meals and converse in the midst of a public square. Araeen makes the point of stressing that “people enter into this work (they do not just look at it but enter it)” and through this passage he took pride in witnessing people becoming part of the creative formation. “Everyone I met in Athens, particularly ordinary people from the street, were full of admiration. It was not just for the food, but that they could go there, sit with other people, from all over the world, poor and rich, eat together and engage in a conversation with them. I saw beggars from the street sitting with rich tourists, eating and talking to each other”.16 This attention to sociality and motion is not the usual heading that guides aesthetic evaluation. As it becomes more prominent in the art world, it also exposes the bias and limitations in the art world’s institutional discourse and apparatus. For instance, the tension between the aesthetic roles and the artistic exploration of sociality is evident in an anecdote related by the curator Iliana Fokinaki. While Fokinaki stated that she was sympathetic to Araeen’s intentions, she also revealed that she was disturbed by an incident she witnessed when she escorted a group of Dutch art students to Athens. “While the artwork was taking place, an invigilator was trying to explain to a hungry Greek pensioner that he had to stand up and give his seat to the students, because this was not a foodbank but an artwork” (Fokinaki & Varoufakis 2017). When I reported this account to Araeen, he was adamant that such an incident was inconceivable and defended the sensitivity of all the staff involved in the project. However, if Fokinaki is correct to address the person who spoke, with alleged contempt, to the Greek pensioner, as an “invigilator”, then we must ask, what is the object that she is protecting, and what is the boundary that she is defending, or in Araeen’s eyes, what creativity is she destroying? This incident is more than a moral play about the expression of solidarity. It also cuts to the task of rethinking the administrative and surveillance apparatus that is rolled out for all art that works through public participation. The mere existence of an “invigilator” could be the kiss of death for an ambient assemblage. The issues that are captured by the heading of ambient assemblage are not merely marginal phenomena in the art world. As Boris Groys noted, the interplay between collaborative and participatory practice is one of the main characteristics of contemporary art:

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Emerging throughout the world are numerous artists’ groups that pointedly stipulate collective, even anonymous, authorship of their artistic activities. What we are concerned with here are events, projects, political interventions, social analyses, or independent educational institutions that are initiated, in many cases, by individual artists, but that can ultimately be realized only by the involvement of the many. Moreover, collaborative practices of this type are geared toward the goal of motivating the public to join in, to activate the social milieu in which these practices unfold. In short, we are dealing with numerous attempts to question and transform the fundamental condition of how modern art functions  –​ namely, the radical separation of artists and their public. (2009: 19) Given the dynamic social relations and complex topologies that are formed by ambient assemblages, it is now worth noting how these practices attempt to escape from the structures that held art within a strict religious order, and also to overcome the matrix freedom and alienation that was constitutive of the modern notion of autonomy. Projects by contemporary artistic collectives, such as Ruangrupa, are not merely seeking to either critique the order of things or represent other things; rather, they are also busy making something else happen. When “it” happens, the relationship between the aesthetic objective and the rest of the world is ambiguous. At one level, the experience of “it” in the events, programmes, and festivals is continuous with other things that are already in the world. The artistic project is of the same stuff as the rest of the world. In that sense, it is hard to see the realization of their artistic objectives as objects. They are not autonomous objects, and even if the emergent social relations exist as an experience in and of itself, this process does not serve as either a mirror that reflects or as a prism for seeing the world anew. This is a collective that does not make art that aims to be collected by connoisseurs. Its value is not even determined by the discursive and normative logic of spectatorship  –​seeing the work, comparing it with others, relating it to other parts of your life –​, but rather, it exists according to a new paradigm of usership and circulation. The democratic goals of Ruangrupa are embedded in public action.17 To do this, artists have discovered that commercial success is not enough and that public opinion is not something that can be captured, but rather it is part of the commons that is worked with. To grasp the contemporary approaches towards the commons will require a different perspective and vocabulary to the ones developed for the modernist artistic strategies. Boris Groys argued that throughout the twentieth century artists strove to extend the boundaries of public opinion and redefine the commons. Whether it was in the mode of unleashing the unconscious, activating the political, recoding gendered roles, or intertwining the public with the private, the aim of redefining the commons was a consistent trajectory of modern art. This involved the introduction of new strategies, the

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mixing of media, and a persistent critique of the status of the artist as the singular source of creativity. Dadaists improvised with the spontaneity and unconscious drives, the Russian avant-​garde sought to embed the artist in the revolution, feminists sought to show how the personal is political, and the project of decoloniality was for Frantz Fanon a reinvestment in humanity by bringing forth the end of that version of humanism that justified racism. However, all these strategies presuppose a detachment from public culture. In the modern era, artists operated on public culture like a surgeon on a body. In Groys’s brief but incisive genealogy of participatory art, he pays particular attention to a countertendency, that is the constitution of mini-​public spheres that arise in the artistic urge to form fellowships. At first, he argues that this fellowship was inspired by the desire to overcome formal boundaries and experiment with different media. However, beyond the exploration of total artworks, Gesamtkunstwerke, this formal experimentation was also meant to be a forerunner of a deeper affiliation between individual and groups. The aim was to move away from the image of the artist as either a mediator of the divine or a genius invested with authorial autonomy. However, Groys also noted that while artists invented strategies that placed greater force in the immediacy and radicality of public participation in events and happenings, the choreography nevertheless revolved around the “corporeal presence of the artist” (2009: 28). The artist was always there to direct the spontaneity. They may have even joined in the collective effervescence, but they never disappeared into the flow of the event; instead, they remained upright like a surfer riding the waves. Is that it? The revenge of the alienated is the conversion of alienation into a transactional lifestyle. If the point of collapsing aesthetic boundaries ends up merely tweaking the ego of the artist, then is it really worth it? And, if increased gullibility is the outcome of the absence of any critical distance, do we regret giving up on objectivity? For all his clarifications, Groys leaves us with a minimized view of the issues and a diminished sense of alternative possibilities. If L’Internationale is to face the challenges summoned by the heading ambient assemblage, I suggest that it also follow the lead of an artist/​activist like Gregory Sholette (2017) as he plots the feedback systems in immersive and interactive artworks. Roland Barthes once claimed that the pleasure of the text is always short. You see it, you get it, and then you exclaim:  “is that all?” (1975:  18). This request for more is not to be confused with the complaint that there is not enough. It is in this spirit of incorporating the sense of deferral with satisfaction that I turn to a more recent collection of essays by Groys, in which he expanded on the maxim that art is not an object to be preserved, but something that must “share the fate of all other things of this world” (2016: 118). For Groys’s favourite artist, Malevich, not only could there be museums without art, but the best art was better when the museum was pulverized into powder. Groys explains how material negation can unleash trans-​historical truths, by

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advancing the religious concept of kenosis. This mystical term for the transfer of meaning neither relies on the pre-​existence of an internal pool of knowledge within the subject nor the pedagogic process of revelation. For Groys, creation can come from aggressive self-​negation and radical absorption. This luminous means is to him also an allegory for the mode of meaning-​making in the age of participation. Today, Groys surmises, we do not spend time contemplating and deliberating over the meaning of art. In the past, kenosis required the devout subject to empty out their individuality in order to make way for the totality of God. Now in a museum we have aesthetic experience, not only in the moment of witnessing objects but also through the experience and participation in events. Groys sees the museum as the institution that is complicit with and responsible for the training of the subject to abandon the sovereignty of their individual gaze. In a museum the visitor loses him/​herself in a number of ways. The pathways are labyrinthine and the object of contemplation has no boundary. The visitor must constantly work with contingency, partiality, and incompleteness. To complain about ephemera and chimera is to miss the point. Everything that exists finds its form amidst flows. Hence, Groys asserts that the function of the museum is to frame the meaning of eventfulness, thematize the occurrence of events, and structure the consciousness of events (2016:  22). The museum becomes the space in which the relation between the near infinite capacity of digital communicative technologies for spawning events is tested against the perceptual limits of the human subject and society’s democratic thresholds. However, he also concludes that this produces a subjectivity that is neither under the divine gaze, nor master of its own destiny: now we have once more a universal spectator, because our “virtual” or “digital souls” are individually traceable. These virtual souls are digital reproductions of our off-​line behavior –​reproductions that we can only partially control. Our experience of contemporaneity is defined not so much by the presence of things to us as spectators, but rather by the presence of our virtual souls to the gaze of the hidden spectator. (2016: 146) Participation is a given now. The critical task is not whether we celebrate or denigrate its public utility, but rather to develop tools for understanding its consequences. How does any mode of participation move us out of the stultifying hermeneutics and open up new horizons of collective consciousness, affect, and embodiment? There is no doubt that being in an ambient assemblage is distinct from the experience of communing with an icon, or that of reading an image. Both of these headings rely on forms of concentrated attention. Under the heading of religiosity and autonomy, the commons is grasped as an abstraction that can be at best applied belatedly to real life. Being in a state of intense concentration before the image meant that the

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experience of the commons was suspended. The capacity of the mind to form mental images is evidence of creative flow from image to body, but it does not automatically take the body closer to a state of fellowship. On the contrary, it checks and cross-​checks, it analyses and compares, it opens and connects, but it also frames and contains. This deliberative mode of thinking has been the epitome of Renaissance man –​a rational figure that can keep the heat of collectivity and spontaneity at bay. The ambient assemblage turns this tradition of thinking and play around. On the one hand, the multiplicity of sources and streams of information can fragment and disperse concentration. Images and information can come from all around, and nowhere in particular. This circumambient saturation of signs can appear to numb the senses, overload the nervous system, and flood an individual’s capacity to think, imagine, or decide. On the other hand, by decentring attention the perceptual field is thrown wide open. Rather than pursuing a single stream, the viewer is immersed in an atmosphere. Attention is no longer fixated on a horizon line but distributed across an aperspectival field. Given that art is increasingly experienced in an open public space, that is, in an urban context where there are competing signals and media forms, there is a radical challenge to understand the overlap between sensory encounters, aesthetic forms, and cognitive deliberations. This context is very different from the encounters that conventionally occur within a gallery, theatre, or cinema. In the traditional and modern art museum the experience of art is still predominantly a one-​on-​one encounter. The training and disciplining of the citizen is designed to prepare them to stand in front of a particular work of art, as an individual, who then analyses, interprets, and evaluates that object and then, hopefully, comes out of it enlightened. This is very different to the experience of someone who is in a public space, who is hanging out with their friends, chit-​chatting on social media, so they are simultaneously here and elsewhere, and whose experience of, and response to symbols, signs, and sounds is to “be across” a variety of media platforms. The conventional interpretative process that occurs in a gallery is closer to the contemplative experience of an icon in a church than it is to the carnivalesque socio-​aesthetic experience of the media-​saturated urban environment.

Double ontology of art Ever since Georg Simmel’s seminal lecture on “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, that was delivered as a lecture alongside an exhibition in 1903, there has been scrutiny over the consequences of visual saturation and the attendant blaze attitude in the urban environment (1976). Walter Benjamin was also quick to note that distraction and fragmentation were not necessarily negative cultural responses (1968). However, for the contemporary theorist Paul Virilio, the experience of visual proliferation and communicative excess is equivalent to a situation that he defined as picnolepsy, where human

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subjectivity is simply overwhelmed by the speed of digital information (1991). A  common anxiety is that our intelligence is being duped by the promise that anything seems affectively possible, but in fact nothing is effected (Han 2018). By contrast, cultural theorists like Gernot Bohme (2014) and Malcolm McCullogh (2013) argue that the new atmospheres and prosthetics in ambient design widen the scope of perception, encourage the capacity to wonder, and promote the ability to mix together different elements. In short, profound questions hang over whether the ambient assemblage overcomes the divide between the affective and the cognitive, and if it can be relied on to usher forth the commons. It also involves a departure from the vertical hierarchies of knowledge dissemination. In an immersive and public environment, the critic does not have either a monopoly or a direct line in sensory experience. If the objective of ambient assemblages is to disperse the points of contact and modes of connection, then this will also distribute the nexus of art and life along a horizontal peer-​to-​peer chain. No critic can address these concerns without multi-​perspectival tools of investigation and a willingness to be immersed in the scenes of production over a long period of duration (Holmes 2007:  290). These issues also return us to the fundamental and unresolved tensions between idealist aesthetics and materialist politics, and prompt us to consider the possibility of regrounding aesthetics in the realm of collective politics. In a recent response to this conundrum, the philosopher Jacques Rancière offered the contention that “life is the notion that allows us to overcome those contradictions” (2017:  597). This contention is tested through his examination of a surprising alliance of sources  –​the writings of Immanuel Kant and John Ruskin, as well as the visual practices of the Soviet avant-​garde. Through these high points in modernist thinking and aesthetic practice he finds a twist in the conventional definitions of beauty, claiming that it is neither the consequence of mechanical integration nor the outcome of formal resolution. Beauty is neither measured against its resemblance to organic perfection, like a flower, nor in its abidance to an a priori conceptual form. On the contrary, the function of art arises from its capacity for expanding and intensifying communication. All forms of communication are necessarily outwardly oriented. They point towards the social and are enhanced by collective practices of exchange and translation. Thus, the beauty of art is not defined by the internal criteria that are derived from either aesthetic autonomy or political utility, but in the “coupling” or the “socialization” that occurs through communication. Art and life are brought together in the unconstrained conjunction of social utility and sensory pleasure. It produces a space, which we could call a heterocosmoi, that is both inviting for the other and affirmative as a “place for life” (2017: 603). Rancière is insistent that this is not a form of unification in which art and life dissolve into each other, but a concordance that is represented as a “supplementary”, and therefore, it yields a perpetually open space.

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Rancière’s formulation of the emancipated spectator stands in relation to the prior notion of the disinterested spectator that was so influential in early modernity. It must be noted, that the use of avant-​gardist visual techniques –​ to disrupt the normative order and rattle sensory modalities –​was operating in a context in which the centrality of the visual in the urban condition was in its early stages. Given the condition of hypervisuality in late modernity, the condition of spectatorship is today as much ironic as it is critical. In response to this shift, theorists and curators linked to L’Internationale have also noted a paradigm shift in the function of art  –​from spectatorship to usership. Steven Wright referred to artistic practices where there is no attempt to use art as a representation of society, but rather, the social and artistic actions are coterminous with each other, as examples of “double ontology”. Wright argues that these practices, such as shared meals, have a “primary ontology as whatever they are, and a secondary ontology as artistic proposition of the same thing” (2013: 22). This conceptual framing is different to Rancière’s. While Rancière’s analysis generally stops with the avant-​garde’s aim to produce a new nexus between the perceptual order and the visual construction of art and life, the challenge for L’Internationale is to go further into the activation of meaning in social relationships. This engagement with art as a medium for relationships has a long history with the museums that are part of L’Internationale. As early as 1994, Bart de Baere collaborated with artists in an exhibition at S.M.A.K. Ghent, This is the show and the show is many things, where the artworks did not simply summon the spectator’s attention, but made a space for the other works that coexisted in the same time and space. This complex spatial overlapping and temporal co-​presence opened the field to the importance of relations. De Baere noted that the artists were not just “process artists –​but artists with process” (1994: 68). Similarly, Zdenka Badovinac argued: “The more art turns towards life, the greater the responsibility of the curator, who now no longer simply has to explain an isolated art object but also relate the context of its creation” (2017b: 96). Thus we can distinguish between the avant-​gardist attempts to overcome separation by means of a radical supplement, and the contemporary assemblages constituted by collectives. In the latter, there is no representation of an absent thing, for the relationship between art and life already operates on a one-​to-​one scale. This orientation towards usership, rather than bringing up yet another critique of spectatorship, is important for Wright, and for many of the projects initiated by L’Internationale, because it marks a break with modernist claims on the function of art, and also speaks to collective practices that both disrupt the institutional expectations on authorship and refuse the museological notion of collection, classification, and commodification. Amidst the ambient assemblage people do not stand before art; they must be involved in it. Wright defends this reorientation of conduct towards usership, whether it occurs inside or outside the walls of the museum, as a means of liberation from the corrosive delusion of exceptionalism “which has left the autonomous

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artworld rife with cynicism” (2013: 12). Sebastian Olma goes one step further and notes that the internal collapse and invasive force of commercialization have compelled artists into a “poetics of performative defiance” against the autonomy of the arts (2018:  11). Esche explains that Wright’s idea of the double ontology of art, whereby the thing itself is acting in the world and something that also carries the burden of symbolism, is central to grasping the relational function of contemporary art: Art and the thing itself has a relation to other things and derives its 1:1 identity with real things in the world through that relation. Art as representation also has a relation to other art performing its representational aspect and that is how we come to know it as art. That is how we come to place a thing in an epistemology, through its relation to other things that are useful and/​or representational or symbolic. By bringing relationality in, it becomes clearer that neither of the two primary ontologies are autonomous, they are both dependent on other objects around them and through which they are understood. In this way, you can get away from the idea that there’s an opposition between autonomy and use, because it’s simply about the way in which you encounter art, or the things that you choose to relate to that object. If you choose to relate only a series of entirely autonomous art objects to it, then you get art and art museums as they mostly are configured. If you relate it to not-​ art things then you might get other institutions and ways of categorising art and other things.18 Arte Util was a landmark exhibition for Esche.19 In this project he could see how people interact with each other. He noted that the interactions produced another level of spatial and self-​awareness, prompting people to take turns, exercise civility, share knowledge so that others can move on, and so on. Suddenly the bodies in the museum assumed a communal identity and stimulated collective knowledge. For Esche, this general transformation of perceptual awareness in the ambient assemblage is an opportunity to push the museum beyond its classical and modern foundations: I think that’s happening at various levels but it needs to be combined more. The potential of L’Internationale is to do things together and shape the debate across a wider field. What Reina Sofia is doing with the narratives around Guernica is a good example. M KHA’s exhibition on rave culture and collectivism is another. I  think the Van Abbemuseum’s Young Art Nights or its dressing up stations are also part of that move. I hope our new collection displays in 2017 will make a contribution by doing two things. Firstly, embracing the story of leaving and remembering modernity, which ends up with a history of Western art exhibition from a Chinese perspective. And secondly an exhibition zone where experience,

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the whole body is placed in the centre. It doesn’t really foreground a curatorial narrative, but is planned rather as the body is going through certain experiences, squeezing, stretching, sitting, lying, working, contemplating. The aim is to create a series of different environments in which the art is in one sense the backdrop and can be discovered by the way it is experienced, rather than as a form of pure intellectual focus. In that sense, I think it does respond to the experiences you describe. We will have a narrative of departure from modernity, but not a contemporary replacement because that would itself be a modern approach. I hope that the content can also emerge through what we call constituencies. That is, groups of local citizens engaged in different pursuits and can make use of the public platform of the museum. Through their enthusiasms, different readings of the works might emerge. Or may not, of course, but they will still have a place in the museum. This concept forces us to think about how to listen and open to different protocols and ways of dispersing our resources, capacities and knowledge.20 The ambient assemblage is also a vital prism for understanding the potential of a constituent museum. It highlights not only the condition of sociality but also the complex uses of memory. For instance, Esche praises the way the Reina Sofia displayed Picasso’s Guernica (1937), not as an object of reverence that is suspended in a discrete and neutral zone, but rather through the contextualization with a complex array of other works from its time and place, including posters, models, films, and documents of political events. In this ambient assemblage the incidental and the central are reconfigured: I think you can also do something, which is not the history of art, but the history of the body and its relationship to art. So, in other words, you could look through the protocols of how art has been displayed, and how this affected how we understand our role in this institution. At the time when modernity was still inventing forms, there were many options that were suppressed by the emphasis that has been given to the autonomy of art inside the white cube. This created a narrow field in which debates about future trajectories took place. It suppressed discussion on what methodologies of education and reception could be. Those become interesting again, at least as historical options that were discarded. We need new cartographies that can link the history of the emancipatory avant-​garde to the idea of the de-​modern and towards the directions that we are forced to travel now. We see that the decline is clear, but then we also need to trace that line back in terms of the bodily experiences and its connections to the colonial. I think you can do this in parallel with the recontextualizing of art history. What we need to do as L’Internationale in any event is to avoid like the plague so much artwork that still (shockingly) replays the empty mantra of avant-​garde radicalism in pure formal

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terms and without any social context. One of the most annoying aspects of museum modernity has been the normalization of the white cube, in particular, the correlation between it and the ideology of the museum as a place of neutrality and transparency. As if the art belonging to the white cube somehow finds itself in the museum without any ideological positioning. What we’re fighting against is this illusion and the forgetting of particular cultural contexts and privileges in order to claim universal truth and application. Our challenge is to make visible the position of the museum and its collection, how even the color choices of a Mondrian are culturally coded. One way to do this that I’m interested in is to limit those contexts by showing possible deviations from that white cube both now and at the moment of high modern invention. To make the white cube become visible by making it one option amongst others.21

All along the street Earlier in this book I  noted that the facade of the classical museum mimicked the form of the Parthenon. This recurring motif was neither incidental nor purely ceremonial. According to Donald Preziosi (1989), it constituted the frame and perspective for seeing the history of art. Seeing the Parthenon from the position of someone standing amidst the Propylea was an allegory for the discovery of a view and a delimiting structure that enabled the commencement of an art historical narrative. This perspective trained the viewer to see art history through a specific Eurocentric starting point and prism. As the viewers progressed through the building, they internalized not just a particular historical story of art, but were expected to register it within a universal historical consciousness. Passing from one room to the next, the spirit of history was meant to be all the more firmly registered, and this spirit both drove the development of each phase of art, as each artist embodied this spirit, but also the spirit was always greater than the sum of its parts. The museum was once like an exclusive club: the meeting place for artists, experts, and elites. It was shrouded in an atmosphere of “passive spectatorship and respectful silence”.22 Artists saw museums as the ultimate destination for their work. By being included in the museum, their work would be consigned to history and elevated above the flux of popular culture. The museum stood as a complement to the library, and even when expanded as a civic institution with a wider democratizing role, it was distinguished from shrines, shops, and sites of spectacle. It did not seek to offer salvation, profit, and instant pleasure. The museum was designed to embody the spirit of history, to give visual form to historical consciousness where all the works of art in the world would have a place and could fit into the schema that curators and art historians had been busy inventing. The classical vision of the museum has, as Douglas Crimp (1993) argued, long been in a state of ruin. In truth, the universalist visions of the museum

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never existed in a pure form. Museums usually articulated the universal through localized perspective and national examples. However, while the cultural status of the museum as the arbiter of taste and cultural development has crumbled, the physical existence of museums has neither disappeared nor fallen into disrepair. On the contrary, they have boomed! The benevolent explanation of this recent growth spurt has been justified by the need to both widen its historical frame and to reach new audiences. A more cynical view would stress that they have become permissive of consumerism and submissive to corporatism. The Pompidou, as an architectural expression of the interplay between discursivity and sociality, marked a turning point in the design of the modern museum. The fact that most contemporary museums are now inspired by fractals and symmetrical geometries is also no coincidence. It announces the end of the classical vision of art history as it speaks to the fragmentation of perspective and pluriversal consciousness in contemporary culture. This has meant that the Eurocentric art history did not only require a little adjustment so that it could admit other entrants, but that the whole system of identification, contextualization, and classification needed to be reconceived. The museum was never a neutral structure. It was a system that was established with explicit restrictions and exclusions. For centuries, shrines and churches had trained the Western public to focus on the word of the priest and direct their gaze towards the altar. In theatres and schools, attention was also directed at the centre of the stage while the imagination drifted upwards towards the apex. The invention of the horizon line in painting and the use of the frame also disciplined the eye and mind towards a precise point. From this mode of linear perception details were decoded, information was organized, and a narrative formed. The museum was therefore the beneficiary of and reliant on a trained public eye. This combination of contemplative and deliberative modes of attention has undergone radical transformation in the digital age. In the hypermediated screen spaces of urban streets and domestic lounges there is now a mode of attention that is more ambient than linear. It proceeds by collaging bits from multiple sources, then assembles meaning from an atmosphere in which judgement and knowledge are seen as iterative and contingent. As information and ideas circulate in unbounded networks, the capacity of a museum to offer a stable and authoritative version of cultural knowledge also fragments. The multiple and complex temporalities that are evoked in contemporary art have also challenged the founding principles of the museum. Contemporary artists are not just representing the flows and folds of time. They are also developing new communicative systems that enhance public feedback as the artwork circulates in ephemeral and ungovernable social processes. Such art “events” are not readily captured by the traditional art historical categories that defined the process of identification through durable objects; contextualized its meaning within recognizable historical periods

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and geographic boundaries; and organized its documentation within discrete genres. How would a museum place this practice in the chronicle of art history? In the absence of possessing secure footings for its own authority, the museum is also no longer seen as the final destination and the fixed source of expert evaluation. Increasingly, it is just another platform for the circulation of ideas. The public comes to the museum not just to express reverence and gain enlightenment but also to heighten their own agency as users. Art historians like Hans Belting have known this for a long time: The museum, as a symbol of a permanent place and of suspended time, thus is badly equipped for the ephemerality of today’s exhibitionary practices. In a society that values data banks of information instead of a treasury of rare objects, a new mis-​en-​scene is required to despatialize and retemporalize the museum even within the museum and to exchange the “event” for the work. (2003: 100) Thus, the time for lamenting the end of meta-​theory or indulging in museological melancholy must surely be over. Rather than throwing our arms in the air and accepting the fate that anything and everything is now art, that all perspectives are equally valid, that each artist is both freed from cultural constraints and burdened with the invention of their entire conceptual field, there is another way forward, one that sees this historical crisis as an opportunity to create spheres of contestation in which art and politics, the other constituents and the ideal of the commons, the modes of attention and distraction, the virtual and the real can forge more robust dialogues.23 New structures need to be invented. Steven ten Thije, one of the senior curators at the Van Abbemuseum, takes an optimistic view that along with a greater sensitivity to the local and the contingent, there is now a case for using museums as a space for gaining access to a common truth (2015: 104). For all its flaws, Esche also claims that the museum possesses a mechanism to go “backwards and forwards from where we are now”, by offering a space for concentrated storytelling.24 There is no way back to the world of the classical and modernist museums. The multiple mobilities have undone all the ontological certitudes and residentialist parameters upon which cultural institutions and identities were lodged. As Paul Virilio noted, the form by which people narrate their life is no longer established by drawing a singular line back to an imperious centre, but by developing relations between multiple points of “traceability” (2017). If L’Internationale, is to embrace agonistic politics, align itself with postsocialist networks, widen itself at least as far as the Eurasian continent, and become demodern, then it will need to be more than just flexible and fluid. The museum today is owned by the many and it moves in manifold ways. The regime of the ambient demands more than choice within a predetermined

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matrix of playful affects. If the museum is a place for circulation rather than destination, then it does not mean that its function is confined to either falling into an indulgent despair about the loss of standards and values, or colluding with the appropriation of the museum into a machine that lubricates the commercialization of culture. In this chapter, I have drawn on, but also overlaid, Rancière’s typology of aesthetic regimes in order to extend his threefold distinction in the condition of spectatorship:  active, passive, and emancipated. Rancière helped us see the traps that confounded the avant-​garde. While avant-​gardist techniques sought to awaken the passive viewer and engage their critical faculties in the processes of imaginative identification, this practice still retained the “stultifying” belief that aesthetic meaning was concealed behind formal appearances, and that the artist’s imperious message was the focal point of interpretation. Rancière’s critique aimed to peel off the stigmatic association between an image and deception, and his portrayal of the emancipated spectator has highlighted the interplay between political agency and aesthetic experience. However, Rancière’s approach does not engage with the challenges of the ambient assemblage. His critical attention remains stuck in the position where the viewer stands before a stage, a screen, or an artwork. We know that the gaze is no longer sovereign and that no image is imbued with the divine. We also accept that the aesthetic is a valid domain of human experience, and that while it is separate from moral and political responses, it still operates in a social sphere. More recently, we have come to appreciate that the cosmos is in motion and everything that we see is grasped in a state of relative blur. There is no fixed point for perspective and no definitive image, and yet, we also persist in the quest to make sense of the images that drift, mingle, and weave all around us. Can we appreciate art not just as an exercise in pedagogic elevation but as part of the human experience of being touched? How do we do this without retreating into the traditional assumption of divine authority and reclaiming the modern fantasy of unbound agency? The challenge from collectives such as Ruangrupa is profound because it prompts new ways of understanding the relationship between action and thought. Rather than returning to the polarity whereby art is confined to either a formal, autonomous, and disinterested activity, or a mode of engagement where its direction and function are determined by an overriding political agenda, it opens another space for the interplay of aesthetic action and public interactions. It suggests that art does not find its expression at the point of illumination, or as the knowing guide for future beginnings, but rather it comes through the tangible and sensory interaction with others. It is immediate and continuous with the experience. However, it also produces a “breathing space” amidst everyday life. The point of reclaiming aesthetics in the materiality of collective experience is not to jettison the practice of deep attentiveness, but to connect it to the dynamic production of common sense.

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In a context in which the artwork is formed in the process of encountering others, making your own multimedia narratives, assembling meaning from found fragments, and then the debate between sociality, aesthetics, and politics also requires an awareness that the experience of mobility not only multiplies the positions and perspectives from which perception occurs, but also an appreciation of how it transforms the conditions of spectatorship. This presents unprecedented challenges for grasping the relationship through which the subject and the collective are mutually apprehended, and calls for new tools to make sense of the interplay between the aesthetics and politics. L’Internationale has provided a starting point for addressing this challenge. While it is premature to conclude that it has developed a sustainable mode of trans-​institutional collaboration and naive to assume that opening doors will ensure conviviality with the other constituents, there can be no doubt that the museums of the commons will need to recognize that the principle of “equality of intelligences” means that the other is not just equipped with the will for intelligence, but also that it has a share in the intelligent structures.

Notes 1 http://​ruangrupa.org/​15/​about-​ruru/​, accessed 10 November 2017. 2 This idea of a post-​object museum is not entirely fanciful. Consider the short-​lived utopian project the Maison des civilisations et de l’unite reunionnaise (MCUR), a museum in a French postcolony of the Indian Ocean, Reunion Island, where Francoise Verges developed the notion of museum without objects, as neither a virtual museum nor a museum of images and sounds, but a museum that would not be founded on a collection of objects, where the objects would one element among others, where the absence of material objects through which to visualize the lives of the oppressed, the migrants, the marginal, would be confronted. We would not seek to fill up a void, to compensate for the absence, we would work from the absence, embracing it fully, for we understood that this absence was paradoxically affirming a presence. To us, the accumulation of objects destined to celebrate the wealth of a nation belonged to an economy of predation, looting defeated peoples or exploiting the riches of others. (2014: 1) 3 On the evolution of the collective in Jakarta and their involvement in international projects see: www.art-​it.asia/​en/​u/​admin_​ed_​itv_​e/​zob8pc1mz3ltl7ntkgdy, accessed 12 November 2017; www.damnmagazine.net/​2016/​01/​14/​the-​thrill-​of-​exchange/​, accessed 12 November 2017. 4 While drawing on Rancière’s (2004) account of the regimes for organizing aesthetic meaning, we also seek to go beyond a critique of the normative structures that are embedded in aesthetic theories and confront the expanded field of spectatorship and participation in contemporary experience; thuse propose to overlay his original conception of the three regimes of art. Rancière argues that aesthetic experience is always constituted through a system of identification that he calls a regime. He claims that there are three regimes for representing aesthetic experience. First,

138  Art without museums there is the Platonic model –​or what he called the ethical regime –​that bound the meaning of an image to its capacity to reflect the “ethos” of community. This is followed by the Aristotelian model –​the representative regime –​that established the meaning of art through its own capacity to define its own rules for organizing its mimetic and evaluative functions. Third, there is the aesthetic regime that is related to the invention of new visual and literary techniques that were used by the avant-​garde to create new relationships between the visible and the invisible. The aesthetic regime starts with the constitution of art in a heteronomous field. For Rancière, the implications of this aesthetic regime are threefold. First, it trained the gaze to consider the boundary of what is art and non-​art as a flexible and porous entity. Furthermore, the boundary was no longer seen as a limit point, but as the very starting point for defining the constitution of art. Second, it shifted the discourse of aesthetics from an account of “good” taste and “noble” distinctions, as it directed attention towards the processes of intelligibility. Third, it undercut the presumption that aesthetic theory invariably fails to grasp the ineffable qualities of art. 5 The demodern is not a return to pre-​modern sensibilities, nor a disavowal of the influence of the modern, but rather an attempt to extract art and ideas out of a context that limits the capacity of the imagination to propose new possibilities. The demodern is closer to an emancipatory spirit that has been captured and disciplined by what modernity has become. (Email correspondence with Charles Esche, 2 October 2017) 6 There is a noteworthy difference between Catholic and Orthodox icons that bears working through. Catholics are at the expressionist end of the religious spectrum. Their 3D sculptures weep and shake, and exist as highly colored super realist idols –​ a bit like kneeling down to pray in a Duane Hansen/​Chapman Brothers exhibition. Orthodox icons are different. They are like written texts as images. The gold leaf background is a barrier to the ineffable world of the spirit. From the Orthodox perspective one reads an icon, one doesn’t experience it like the Catholics. Both have their place in the discussion about the spiritual equivalences in modern art but they lead to different kinds of modern works and different interpretations. There is also the additional legacy of Protestant imagery (or its lack) as well as Islamic and Kabbalist Jewish influences on art. (Email correspondence with Charles Esche, 2 October 2017) 7 Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. 8 Sven Lütticken notes that concept of autonomy has been forged through rival perspectives in art and politics (2014). The common association of autonomy in activist circles is with the Italian political movement of the 1960s. However, in art theory it dates back to Kantian philosophy and then splits in the divergent interpretations offered by Greenberg and Adorno. Lütticken has set out to both separate these perspectives and then critique the tendency in the debates on artistic activism to combine and at times conflate these ideas. Lütticken remains sceptical of the view that any system is capable of developing in line with its own internal logic and also disputes that the modern moral subject is free to act in a disinterested manner. 9 www.e-​flux.com/​announcements/​42303/​whatever-​happened-​to-​social-​democracy/​, accessed 10 May 2019.

Art without museums  139 1 0 11 12 13 14

Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. Of course, Crow is not alone in this effort to resurrect the art historical endeavour by avoiding what he calls the regression into “redundant” aesthetic judgement, and compensate for the “diminishing returns” of historical contextualization. (2017:  134). There is a sustained defence of the traditional foundations. For instance, when facing the growing ideological pressure of the current context, T.  J. Clark has felt the need to revivify the concept of tragic pessimism (2012), and Terry Smith in his grand project to address the complexity and diversity of contemporary art has returned to the old regional surveyor tools and repurposed the use of genre and style as categories for classification (2009, 2012). However, there are also important countertendencies. David Summers conceded that the conventional art historical approaches based on either a visual analysis of the formal resemblances between the artworks, or the historiography of the artist’s origin are inadequate tools for addressing both the cosmopolitan dialogues in art, and the capacity of art to be a medium for “the first impulses in which the world is ‘formed’ and made into a characteristic unity” (2003:  33). Mark Cheetham has also acknowledged that there is a need to find the “connective tissues that enable artists to be properly placed and appropriately mobile” (2009). Marsha Meskimmon’s attempt to track the ways artists engage “with the processes and practices of inhabiting a global world”, and participate “in a critical dialogue between ethical responsibility, locational identity and cosmopolitan imagination” is one of the first attempts to outline a new cosmopolitan approach in art history (2011: 5). In the first issue of the journal Field, the editor Grant Kester announced that not only has contemporary art become a complex, contradictory and unruly area of practice that is distinguished by its extraordinary geographic scope, but also by it development of a field of practice that is “driven by a common desire to establish new relationships between artistic practice and other fields of knowledge production, from critical pedagogy to participatory design, and from activist ethnography to radical social work”.

Kester also noted that “it has become increasingly evident that the normative theoretical conventions and research methodologies governing contemporary art criticism are ill equipped to respond” to this new field of contemporary practice. To this end they advocate for new ethnographic and immersive tactics that involve critics spending “an extended period of time at the site of a specific project” and encourage a critical analysis “that can gauge the long-​term effects of socially engaged practices”. www.artandeducation.net/​announcements/​106609/​field-​issue-​ 1, accessed 1 September 2017. 15 Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. 1 6 Email correspondence with Rasheed Araeen, 18 June 2017. 17 “This shift is for me part of the demodern shift. It moves away from the idea of teleological progress and towards the democratic goal of acting in the present” (Email correspondence with Charles Esche, 2 October 2017).

140  Art without museums 1 8 Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. 19 https:// ​vanabbemuseum.nl/​ en/​ p rogramme/​ p rogramme/​museum-​of-​arte-​util/​, accessed 2 May 2018. 20 Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. 21 Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016. 22 Email correspondence with Charles Esche, 2 October 2017. 23 See, for instance, this dialogue:  Art, Museum and Democracy, between Charles Esche, Bart De Baere, and Manuel Borja-​Villel, 12 December 2016: https://​vimeo. com/​214639419, accessed 20 June 2018. 24 Charles Esche, interview, Eindhoven, 15 September 2016.

Afterword Confederate or perish

The European Union began as an economic project that sought political agreement. Despite the promises of unity in diversity, the idea of shared cultural interests is still given lip service, humanitarian obligations have been trashed, and everything is sacrificed to the benefit of global economic forces. Leaving culture and justice to the last is a mistake that Europe continues to repeat. As the gap between the founding promises and the current predicament grows and big narratives become less visible, it seems that the only worthy battles are confined to the attempts to curb the worst excesses of xenophobic nationalism and precarious globalism (Streek 2019:  132). Even compliant presidents now complain that the European Union is dominated by groups that lack “constitutional legitimacy”, operate in “institutional obscurity”, possess “disproportionate powers”, exercise “draconian measures”, reflect the “economic forces of globalization”, and that as a consequence the resulting political entity exists in a “democratic vacuum” (Paulopoulos 2018: 125–​131). As the European Union’s system of governance continues to “transform power into a ghost” (Marsili & Milanese 2018: 109) and strip its citizenry of any real agency, is it a surprise that the public sphere is dominated by resentment? Against these trends there are movements that are calling for real and transparent forms of democracy. However, they are also insisting on a new transnational framework for culture. The question of culture in mainstream European discourses is trapped in a paradigm that on the one hand, gives primacy to the preservation of national heritage, and on the other, is simultaneously anxious over the threats of social segregation and timid before the hysteria over cultural invasion. This approach both exaggerates the threats and underestimates the dynamics of mobility. Let us consider two kinds of scenarios of mobility and immobility. In the suburbs of Paris, the derelict streets in central Athens, and the camps near Calais, there are people who are trapped. They cannot move. To many people from the outside, they live in No Go In zones, but for those on the inside these places are also No Go Out zones. Young people are forging baffling identities and producing disturbing images of their sense of

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belonging to this “no mans land”. Children of immigrants declare: “I don’t belong here and I have not come from anywhere else”. Protesters in the heat of fire and accusations pronounce: “I am a dog! I bite at anything”. A boy is asked about his future and he reveals that: “I want to become a migrant”. They are stuck and they dream of movement. They see cages and become animals. They are segregated and do not dream of being integrated. They see themselves as merely existing in limbo and the dominant self-​image is that of a zombie. These are people who can see that they are in Europe but they are neither from nor of Europe. By contrast there are the Euro-​star images that emphasize hyperdiversity and mobility. It is not just corporate elites that are on the move. Artists are increasingly moving from festival to biennale. Communities composed of migrants may establish themselves in local neighbourhoods, but they also have extensive diasporic networks. Migrants tend to show above average rates in out-​ marriage, charitable donations, neighbourly relations and upward residential mobility. These are not people that, as Trevor Phillips, the broadcaster and former British politician feared, are “sleep walking towards segregation”. What sort of framework can make sense of these contradictions? Does this current predicament fit with the prevailing cultural visions of Europe? Multiculturalism has been a key heading for administering these principles. However, as a political instrument, multiculturalism was designed in response to the post–​Second World War patterns of migration to Canada and Australia. During this period assimilationist policies were weak, and the agency of the migrants was more vigorous. It also occurred at the time when diversity was promoted as an ideal that could enhance and strengthen the nation state. European leaders remain aloof to the new realities. What was dismissed as a “problem” unique to settler societies is fast becoming an irreversible predicament that is common to all complex societies. This demographic fact and its social and cultural consequences continue to be the subject of widespread denial. The assault on multiculturalism is pronounced in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. However, it is also notable that political leaders across Europe have attacked multiculturalism as if it were the cause for social polarization and cultural disengagement. We hear calls that hark back towards the idylls of a unified nation: one that has at its centre “muscular liberalism”, a “defiant republicanism”, or the rebirth of Leitkultur. With the outbreak of terrorist attacks, ethnic ghettos were targeted as the hotspots for “grooming” disaffected youth. The new consensus from centre-​right and alt-​right is that multiculturalism is neither a practical source of mutual benefit nor a pragmatic political compromise that secured social cohesion. At best, multiculturalism is mourned as a utopian ideal that was gifted to ungrateful minorities who exploited it to gain unfair advantages, and at worst, it is scorned as a divisive ideology with which the “enemies of Europe” can abuse the hospitality of their hosts.

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These simplistic slogans and crude options tell us nothing of what will work in a world of complexity. They not only fail to capture the productive forces that arise from the mingling of people and the mixing of ideas, but also ignore the wider stories of harmonious coexistence, cultural stimulus, and civic participation. However, simply calling for a bit more tolerance towards difference seems naive. It is not enough to keep promoting the image of Europe as a vibrant mosaic. The world has changed dramatically. The turbulence of mobilities and the speed of communication have already made the sense of belonging more complex. People now claim to have multiple identities, and are affiliated with transnational networks. Feeling connected to, and being part of, different and disparate communities is banal. In this globalizing world the scope of belonging and the forms of attachment have changed dramatically. The cultures that are in here are also out there. These cultures of Europe are not contained within national boundaries, and often extend beyond the region. Hence, the old models no longer look like a solution. We can no longer assume that there is agreement on the idealized common heritage from which European civilization supposedly draws, let alone have faith that the aggregation of national perspectives can forge a unified vision. Cultural luminaries such as Bernard-​ Henri Lévy (2019) and Umberto Eco (2017) were aghast at the abyss that threatens Europe, and were disappointed that their values were not “shared with everyone else” (Eco 2017: 158). Is it enough to recount that the name of Europe comes from a Greek myth of an Asian princess abducted by the lascivious Zeus disguised as a bull, and that her Syrian brother Cadmus comes to Greece looking for her, fails to find her, establishes the city of Thebes, and introduces the gift of the alphabet? The solution may not be as simple as a strong dose of pedagogy for the masses. It will require more than pointing out that the philosophers in ancient Athens were mostly strangers to the city, and that an emperor in Rome could have been a black man born in Africa. Idealizing the past will not help us define the ways in which institutions and identities can be organized in the present reality. The current catastrophe may also require a turning upside down of our approach towards cultural learning and political participation. The future of the museums of the commons is caught in this tangled scenario. Trapped in an endless spiral of designer gigantism and consumerist hedonism, museums must at the very least pause, for if Thomas Krens, who as the former director of the Guggenheim was at the front of this trend, makes the sobering suggestion that “bigger is not necessarily better”, then it is surely time to take stock and look to other ways to care for our fragile bodies, communities, and planet. Changes in attitude are slow and uneven. Museum directors continue to oversee costly restructures. The persistence of the myth of heroic individualism is still evident in the repeated decisions by artists and curators to seek out their separate chances. Many museums continue to display knowledge from the top down, and are reluctant to open themselves as places

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of public usership and collective practice (Wright 2013: 39). L’Internationale is an outrider. It has been forged in the conflict zone of diminished resources and expanded expectations, but rather than perishing in the self-​defeating ordeal of doing more with less, it has opted to confederate. In this regard, it is very difficult to maintain the defense of the public institution today because the dichotomy between “public” and “private” –​on which social organization has rested for the past century and a half –​no longer works. The creative dimension that defines our society now lies in both the private and public spheres, which are separated in an illusory fashion. Casting the public sphere as the disinterested administrator of creativity does not guarantee that such creativity will not be expropriated for profit. “Public” now signifies a management regime founded on property, whose goods are thus transferable no matter how accessible they are to a broad sector of the population, and despite the fact that they may be administered by the state. (Borja-​Villel 2017a: 19) Where do we place responsibility? The private sector should shoulder the burden of care for the resources, values, and lives that it draws from, but similarly, we should be equally demanding of the public art institutions and insist that they too take up the side of artists and protect the art that they have tasked themselves to serve. Today these interests, both in the private and the public sector, have exploded out of the boxes in which they were previously contained. There are many voices in L’Internationale that argue for the museum as a space that offers a platform for the constituents, a medium for rerouting the ambient assemblage, and a sanctuary to pause and reflect on society. Vasif Kortun acknowledged the importance of the museum as a space of exemption, but he also qualified this analogy by adding that it is not a space either reserved for elites or relieved from critique: “it cannot be a church looking like a monastery for the cognoscenti or a monastery looking like a church” (2018a). As such, the old representational system, which confined both the curatorial duty of care and the scholarly definitions of context, is inadequate. If we are also going to accept that the public is neither a homogeneous blob nor confined to the position of a detached spectator, then this has consequences. The “top down” curatorial approach, the “remoteness” of the archive from the everyday, and the nexus between well-​meaning “community work” and structural transformation in knowledge production need to be recast. More flexible and subtle modes of address and systems of identification are necessary. Museums cannot pull up their drawbridge, and curators shouldn’t murmur on about how difficult it is to invent a solution. At the very least they need to experiment, and if it fails, then at least we know to try something else.

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Similarly, faith in the inevitable ascent of democracy on the back of a communication revolution now seems misplaced. Amongst critical theorists, especially in Jürgen Habermas’s work, there is a strong argument that modern advances in communication technologies has a progressive dynamic that will eventually bring the world towards democracy. Unlike Martin Heidegger, who had nothing but disdain for publicness, which he saw as a levelling-​down process in which everything gets obscured, for Habermas publicness is the space for political self-​criticism and it is based on the assumption that communication and democracy are conjoined:  the more transparent the one, the more the other becomes palpable. Thus, as the communication revolution enhanced intersubjective relations, it was assumed that these relations, while driven by capitalist forces, would also nurture democratic structures. However, the emergent and prevailing forms of intersubjectivity do not seem to be guided by cultural values such as curiosity, dialogue, trust, collaboration, and collectivity. On the contrary, the communication explosion has been harnessed to operate under market conditions. In this market, culture is neither protected nor really cherished. Markets are places for the trade in commodities. This is neither equivalent to nor consistent with the exchange of ideas. Markets are not necessarily for enlightenment or pleasure. They are places for the realization of profit. Therefore, markets only trade in culture when it is just a commercial brand. That is its business. Communication has not tamed capitalism. On the contrary, it has enhanced some of its most regressive and individualist tendencies. The fantasy of the museum as a temple that provides succour to the elites, a display cabinet of global conquest, and an island detached from the flows of everyday life has ended. It is undeniably now caught up in a chain of relations that link it with social cohesion at one end and global competition at the other. Museums are more crowded and more popular. It is well known that the Louvre has over ten million visitors a year. This is well in excess of the combined gate figures in the stadia of Manchester United, Real Madrid, Paris St. Germain, and Bayern Munich. However, the impact of this museum traffic, the consequences of deluded boredom, the complicities with depleted entertainment, the dependencies on the gallery-​gift shop-​cafe nexus are all passed over. Often, all that remains is the vague hope that something educative, socially cohesive, and aesthetically inspiring actually occurs en route. In retrospect it seems naive to have assumed that communication would widen social outlooks, forge new collective networks, and lift the democratic agenda to new heights. If anything, it has contributed to the massive contradiction of our time. We live in a world that is culturally more interconnected than ever before, the affective realm of the public sphere has expanded, and yet, there are also unprecedented levels of civic disengagement, socio-​economic inequality, geopolitical polarization, and wretched loneliness. We have witnessed the sawing away of old structures, the transfer of massive public assets to private interests, the

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eroding of traditional authority structures, and in their place, we have bloated globalism and resentment writ large at the local level. The challenge that confronts L’Internationale, and all the other institutions that have committed themselves to being part of a worldwide-​movement of culture as a common good, is to imagine an alternative to the bad binary of welfarism or globalism. There is no return to state welfarism, because that ground has lost its colonial underpinnings and been dismembered by politicians that have lied to their people. Similarly, there is a growing recognition that the other bad option is untenable. There is no point in embracing the functionality of a global icon as that is beyond the grasp of the 99.99 per cent. As for the trickle-​down theory, that was just a massive con. L’Internationale is not built on the profound duplicity of the autonomy for the arts, and it would be foolish to compete with the mega-​institutions. Thus far, it has not sought to bulk up its visibility by employing starchitects, or expand its bases through a franchise system. On the contrary, it has set out to constitute new relations by treating the public not as casual visitors but as constituents that operate in local and transnational contexts. This could end up as another fanciful artistic experiment in political utopianism, or serve as a resource for constituting the commons. In his bittersweet reflections on the splendid rise of workers’ self-​ management and the abysmal descent into brainwashed mini-​nationalism in Yugoslavia, Darko Suvin uses the phrase “auroral astonishment” to express his admiration of the efforts to build a concrete utopia (2018). Amidst my own fumbling frustrations, I hope that I have conveyed both the flash of optimism that comes with a new experiment and a heavy-​hearted analysis of the structures for spawning solidarity. The challenges facing the contemporary museum are legion. However, the horizon is not only shaped by the forces that promote neoliberalism. There is also a willed struggle towards realizing the commons. The object of this book is to catch a glimpse of a reality that is just coming to the surface. It draws on the projects and aspirations expressed by the key actors in L’Internationale. The frame that has emerged is distinctive, and I have no doubt that it will have a generative effect in the world of museums and contemporary art. However, rather than being a record of past achievements, my aim has been to attend to future possibilities. By contributing a range of thematic reflections and conceptual conjectures, I  also seek to reckon with the formation of a new grid for linking elements that have surfaced in the frame of L’Internationale. While in my mind this book seeks to outline something that exists in the trans-​institutional aims that are not all yet here, I also hope that it gives a sense of the other constituents whose paths between and across institutions are always out of line.

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Index

Adajania, Nancy 31, 75 aesthetics 72, 116, 120, 124, 129, 136 After Audience (conference) 84 Aiken, Nick 59 Alexandria 20 Alptekin, Hüseyin 6, 84, 97 Altes, Berlin 22–​23 “ambience”, concept of 12–​13, 39 ambient assemblages 117, 124–​136, 144 Anderson, Sven 39 Andre, Carl 121 Araeen, Rasheed 31, 124 art: beauty of 129; double ontology of 128–​133; function of 130 art historians 123 Arte Util (exhibition) 131 artists: agency of 123; in East Europe 93–​94; as entrepreneurs 120–​121; role of 37, 126, 129 Ashmole, Elias (and the Ashmolean Museum) 22 assemblages see ambient assemblages; trans-​national assemblages assimilationist policies 142 associate partners of L’Internationale 3 Athens and Athenian philosophers 141, 143 “auroral astonishment” (Darko) 146 autonomy 121–​125, 131; modern concept of 125 avant-​garde movement 27, 126, 129–​133, 136 Ayas, D. 59 Badovinac, Zdenka 2–​6, 14, 55–​57, 64, 78, 130, 110n21 Bakunin, Mikhail 10 Barenblit, Ferran 3, 45, 52, 77 Barr, Alfred 25 Barthes, Roland 126 Baudelaire, Charles 72 Baumgarten, Alexander 71–​72 beauty 129 Belgium 5

Bello, Cristina Camara 55 belonging: forms of 41; sense of 141–​143 Belting, Hans 118–​119, 135 Belvedere Museum, Vienna 22 Benjamin, Walter 6, 128 Bennett, Tony 22, 24, 28 Berardi, Franco 90 Berger, John 74–​75, 82 biennales 30, 39 Bildung 23, 34 Bodin, Jean 105 Bohme, Gernot 129 Borja-​Villel, M. 3, 5–​6, 8, 23, 25, 29, 32–​33, 35, 50, 57, 75, 79, 85–​91, 104, 108–​109n21, 144 Brey, Ricardo 31 British Museum 25 Broodthaers, Marcel 6, 27 Bruguera, Tania 39, 94 Buren, Daniel 27 Butler, Judith 6 Butt, Zoe 55 Byrne, Gerard 39 “cabinets of curiosity” 20 Caka, Basak 99 Calais 141 capitalism 69–​70, 76, 145 Carter, P. 52 Catalan nation 88 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 25 Cerda, Tonina 90, 108–​109n21 Cheetham, Mark 139n14 Chinese perspectives 131 Clark, T.J. 139n14 coalitions 52, 105 collaboration 11; see also trans-​ institutional (and trans-​national) collaboration collective voice of the public 34–​35 collectives 100 commercial success of art 125

Index 159 commercialism and commercialization 28–​29, 131, 136 commodification of art 26 common truth, access to 135 commons, the 56, 58, 63, 70, 95, 125–​129, 146 communication technology 34, 127 communitarianism 70 community engagement 105 conceptual art 120 Condorelli, Celine 55 confederation, concept of 52–​55; see also L’Internationale as a confederation “The Constituent Museum” (conference) 83–​87 constituent museums 101–​106, 109–​110n21, 132 constituents 7–​13, 37, 41, 46, 56–​60, 63, 75–​80, 85–​88, 92–​102, 108–​109n21, 146; definition of 85–​88 consumerism 29 contemporary art 30–​31, 40–​41, 50, 69, 88, 95, 97, 124, 134 conviviality 13, 49, 57–​63, 104, 137 co-​production  105 corporate cultures 29 corporate management 60 corporate sponsorship 2 cosmopolitan imaginary 78 cosmopolitanism 14–​15, 32–​33, 63, 65 cosmos, use of the term 72 Courbet, Gustave 75 Creischer, Alice 75 Crimp, Douglas 133 critics 129 Crow, Thomas 117, 139n14 cultural policy advisers 29 curatorial practice 83, 144 custodial care 82 Dadaists 119–​20, 126 De Baere, Bart 2–​5, 7, 27–​29, 40, 52, 54, 59, 62, 70, 78, 94–​96, 103, 122, 130 decision-​making processes  59 decolonizing the imagination 36 Deleu, Luc 78 Deleuze, Gilles 37, 62 democracy: and communication 145; faith in 145; representative 122 democracy deficit 52 Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) 2 democratization of museums 37 “demodern” agenda for art 122 demographic trends 142 deregulation of markets 12 Deviant Practice programme 76 digital technology 127 “distracted spectatorship” 77

diversity: in museums 31; in society 142 Douglas, Stan 39 Douroux, Xavier 101–​102 Drabble, B. 87 Duchamp, Marcel 27 Durham, Jimmie 6, 29–​31, 88 Eco, Umberto 143 Einwezor, Okwui 31 engagement of the public 82, 89, 105 Ennigaldi-​Nanna in Ur 20 “ensemble” concept (Deleuze and Guattari) 62 “epistemic partnership” (Marcus) 101 equality of intelligence, principle of 137 Ersoy, Ozge 62 Esche, Charles 2–​5, 7, 9, 33, 40, 51–​53, 58, 76, 85, 94, 109–​110n21, 121–​123, 131–​135 Eurocentrism 30, 134 Europe, origin of the name of 143 European Charter of the Commons 2 European civilization 143 European discourses 141 European Union (EU) 1–​2, 12, 40, 50–​51, 62, 141 European-​wide movements  38 “exhibitionary complex” 24–​25, 28, 30, 35 exhibitory practices 135 Exposito, Marcelo 33, 57–​58, 103–​104, 108–​109n21 Fanon, Frantz 126 fellowships 126 feminism 126 figmenta 71 Fletcher, Annie 109–​110n21 Fokinaki, Iliana 124 Forensic Architecture Group 77 Foucault, Michel 20, 60, 68–​69, 79 franchise model for cultural institutions 53 Franke, A. 31–​32 Fraser, Andrea 27 Fridericianum, Kassel 22 friendship 55, 60, 64 Galeano, Eduardo 122 Gardner, Anthony 86 geo-​politics  31 Gezi Park protest 97–​99, 104 Gielen, Pascal 54, 96 Gilbert, J. 95 Gillick, Liam 124 Glissant, Édouard 6, 89 global challenges 15 global financial crisis (2009) 91 globalization 15, 63–​65, 121, 143; of culture 63 Glossary of Common Knowledge 37–​38

160 Index Glyptothek, Munich 22–​23 Gombrich, Ernst 117, 120 Gordon, Douglas 39 governance models 51–​52 Gowda, Sheela 30 Gramsci, Antonio 2 Grandas, Teresa 59, 73, 91–​92 Greece 2, 105 Groys, Boris 117, 120–​121, 124–​127 Guattari, Félix 62 Guernica 131–​132 Guggenheim Museum 33, 40, 53 Gulf Labour movement 40 Haacke, Hans 6, 27, 88 Habermas, Jürgen 145 Hammons, David 30 Hanquinet, L. 23 Haq, Nav 59 Hardt, M. 61 Harney, S. 84 Heidegger, Martin 145 Hers, F. 101–​102 heterocosmoi 65, 70–​80, 129; as spaces of cultural production 70–​72; and world-​making  73–​78 heterotopias 68–​69 Hetherington, K. 69 “hidden spectator” 127 Hinderer, Max Jorge 75 Holland, C. 32 Homer 72 Horsfield, Craigie 88 Hoskote, Ranjit 75 Huizinga, Johan 118 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 23 icons 118, 121 identity politics 30–​31 Independent Study Programme (PEI) 90 Indonesia 116 “infotainment” 20, 28 “instituent practices” (Raunig) 91 intelligence, individual and collective 77 International Association of Art Critics (AICA) 50 International Council of Museums (ICOM) 50 L’Internationale i, 2; absence of sectarian interests 59; aims of 2, 38, 51, 80; challenges faced by 73, 102, 104, 115, 126, 130, 146; as a confederation 3, 10, 39, 49–​53, 58–​63, 73, 85, 144; context for 62; core tasks of 64; creative spirit of openness in 56–​57; as a decentralized project 3; directors of 5–​8, 51, 59–​60; exhibition and research programme 12; expansive vision of 4; governance procedures 59–​61; movement

on several fronts 11; physical presence of 9; possible future directions for 13–​14, 35–​41, 59–​62, 70, 103, 131–​137, 146; shared codes and values in 60; working groups 58–​62, 73 L’Internationale (workers’ anthem) 10 internationalism 50 IRWIN (collective) 64–​65, 92–​93, 98 Italy 2 Jones, Jonathon 32 Július Koller Society (SJK) 2 Kant, Immanuel 23, 75, 129 kenosis concept 127 Kester, Grant 139n14 Klonk, C. 24 knowledge production 73 Komeji, Miklavz 55 Kortun, Vasif 5, 7, 28–​30, 34–​35, 40, 53, 83–​87, 97, 99, 103–​104, 123, 144 Kralj, Breda 98 Krauss, Rosalind 69 Krens, Thomas 53, 69, 143 Krishnamurthy, Prem 100–​101 Kunst & Museumjournaal (magazine) 29 Kunstverein München 85 Kusama, Yayoi 29 Lévy, Bernard-​Henri  143 Le Witt, Sol 120 Liefooghe, M. 23 Lind, Maria 11, 85 linear perception in art 134 The Long 1980s (book) 12 Lopez, Sonia 92 Lorey, Isabell 89 Louvre, the, Paris 22, 33, 145 Louvre Abu Dhabi 32–​33 Lozano-​Hemer, Rafael  39 MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) 2, 4, 76–​77, 82–​85, 88–​93, 99–​105, 108n21 McCullogh, M. 129 McDougall, Ruth 55 McEvilly, Thomas 26–​27 Malevich, Kasimir 25–​26, 126 Marcus, George 7, 101 Mari, Bartomeu 91–​92 markets 145 Marsili, L. 141 Marx, Karl 10, 63, 75–​76 Massumi, Brian 97 Medalla, David 83 Meskimmon, Marsha 139n14 M HKA (Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen) 2, 4, 78, 94–​96, 122, 131

Index 161 Michel, Christian von 22 Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) 3, 83 Milanese, N. 141 Miliband, Ralph 54 Misiano, Victor 56 Mizerit, Ana 55 Moderna galerija ((MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia) 2, 103 modularization 69 “mondialities” (Glissant) 6 Mondrian, Piet 133 Morrison, Toni 50 Moten, F. 84 Mouffe, Chantal 6, 41, 61, 89, 96 multiculturalism 32, 142 Musée de Luxembourg, Paris 24 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, Madrid, Spain) 3–​4, 35, 49–​50, 75–​76, 79, 91, 100, 131–​132 “museum”, first use of the word 20 museum cabinets, use of 21 museum directors 29, 143 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York 3, 24, 33, 53 museums: aims of 19–​20, 31; atmosphere of passive spectatorship and respectful silence 133; challenges for 83; criticisms of 1–​2, 26–​27, 87; cultural status and intellectual authority of 55, 134–​135, 145; function of 24, 28, 77, 83, 102, 127, 136; origins of 20; physical presence of 134; private/​public boundary for 21–​22, 27, 144; traditional 128; twentieth-​century tensions in 25–​27 museums of the commons 6, 10–​11, 36–​38, 77, 83, 137, 143 Muzeum Suzuki Nowoczesnej, Warsaw 3 Mytkowska, Joanna 3 Nancy, Jean-​Luc  15, 61 National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin 3 nation-​building  22 Negri, Antoni 61, 90, 104 neoliberalism 12, 14, 28, 34–​36, 40–​41, 50–​54, 69, 84, 89, 96, 103, 105, 146 networks 54–​55, 62–​64; of artists 2 Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) 64, 73 “new institutionalism” and “new institutionality” 85, 89 new public management 12, 91 New York “Happenings” 119–​120 Ocelan, Abdullah 52 Ogut, Ahmet 39, 94 Olma, Sebastian 131 Öner, Meric 3, 73–​74, 99 Ortiz, Daniela 86

The Other Story (exhibition) 31 outreach programmes 83 outsourcing 12 “over-​indemnifying” communities  87 painting 75 Pamuk, Orhan 97 Papastergiadis, Nikos (author) i, 39 Paris 141 Parreno, Phillippe 34 Parthenon, the 33 participation 41, 85, 104–​105, 124–​127 Peabody Essex Museum 22 Pergamon 20 Perry, Katy 29 perspective, invention of 123 Petresin-​Bachelez,  N.  54 Phillips, Trevor 142 Picasso, Pablo 132 picnolepsy 128–​129 Piketty, Thomas 1 Piskur, Bojana 55, 62 place, significance of 74–​75 plurality and pluriversality 53, 59, 65 Pompidou Centre 28, 134 populism 105 post-​colonialism  31 post-​impressionism  24 postmodern condition 72 Potosi 75–​76 power relations 51–​52 Preziosi, Donald 133 private collections 21–​22, 25, 29, 33 private sector 144 protection of the art in public institutions 144 Prouns concept 26 public–​private partnerships  29–​30 public relations 83 public sphere 35, 89, 141, 144–​145 PUNK (exhibition) 82 Rabih Mroué x radical museology 79 Rampley, M. 22 Rancière, Jacques 89, 116, 129–​130, 136 Raunig, Gerald ii, 58, 61–​63, 70, 78–​79, 89, 91 refugees 102–​103 religious belief 117–​118 Renaissance, the 117, 119, 122, 128 retrotopias 68 revolution, social 63 Ribalta, J. 89, 91, 100, 108–​109n21 Rolnik, Suely 89 Roman emperors 143 Rooseum Malmo 85, 121 Rothko, Mark 118 Rovelli, Carlo 117

162 Index Ruangrupa 119–​120, 123, 125, 136 Ruskin, John 129 SALT, Istanbul 3–​4, 11, 49, 76, 84, 97, 99–​101 Salvini, Francesco 86 SAN Art 83 Sanchez-​Cedillo, Raul  86–​87 Savage, M. 23 Savski, Andrej 98 scale, function of 78 Schafhausen, N. 59 Schollhammer, Georg 3 Schuman, Robert 1 Schwitters, Kurt 27 Second World War 50 sectarian interests 59–​60 Sekula, Allan 103 Serota, Sir Nicholas 83 Shamiyaana 124 sharing of collections and of information 62, 83 Sholette, Gregory 126 Siekmann, Andreas 75 Simmel, Georg 128 skating 82–​85 S.M.A.K. Ghent 130 Smithson, Robert 26–​27 social cohesion 24, 145 social outlooks, widening of 145 socialism and socialist tradition 10, 58 sociality 61–​64, 70, 76, 92, 124, 131 “spacing of time” 69–​70 Spain 2, 49–​50, 89 spectatorship in art 77, 116, 119–​127, 130, 133, 136–​137 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 7, 72 Stedelijik, Amsterdam 25 Stengers, I. 65 Steyerl, Hito 6, 30 Stilinovic, Mladen 6 Stoic philosophy 72 Summers, David 139n14 Surface–​Frame–​Grid diagram  9, 104 Suvin, Darko 146 Sweden 121 Syria 101 Syriza 105 Tapia, Mabel 100 Tàpies, Fundació Antoni 88 Tate Gallery 33, 53, 83 Taylor, B. 26–​27 Teh, David 116 Tekin, Latife 97 ten Thije, Steven 33, 121, 135 Tensta Konsthall 83

terrorist attacks 142 Thatcher, Margaret 121 thinking: deliberative mode of 128; sensuous or rational 72 Tiravanija, Rirkrit 83 Tito, Marshal 14 tourism 2, 29 Townhouse 83 Tramway Gallery, Glasgow 121 trans-​institutional (and trans-​national) collaboration 1, 4, 6, 12, 14, 39, 41, 49–​50, 59–​64, 83, 86, 101, 137 trans-​national assemblages  62–​65 trickle-​down theory  146 Turkey 97, 101 Turrell, James 39 Uranjek, Roman 64–​65, 94, 98 “The Uses of Art” programme 59 utopias 68 Valand Academy, Gothenburg 3 Van Abbemuseum (VAM), Eindhoven 2, 4, 25, 49, 76, 94, 109n21, 131, 135 Van Den Driessche, M. 23 Van Hout, N. 21 Varoufakis, Yanis ii Virilio, Paul 128–​129, 135 Virnio, Paolo 89 Virno, P. 57 vitrines 21 Vogelnik, Borut 64–​65, 94 Warhol, Andy 28 Warner, Michael 89 Weizman, Eyal 77 welfare state 121 “Whatever Happened to Social Democracy?” (research initiative) 121 white cube, the 133 Wilder, Billy 4 Wilson, Fred 27 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 22 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 88 Wolff, Janet 117 worldwide movement of culture 146 Wright, S. 9, 97, 130–​131 Wunderkammer 20–​23 Yugoslavia 14, 55–​56, 146 Zeleznik, Adela 58, 93 Živadinov, Dragan 98 Zizek, Slavoj 6, 12 zombies and zombie institutions 28, 44, 116, 122, 142