Conference 28 - 29 November 2015
The Art of Ethics in the Contemporary Art Institution The Art of Ethics in the Contemporary Art Institution is part of the conference series Overgaden LECTURES, which was launched in 2013 to provide an annual opportunity to explore key tendencies in the field of contemporary art in depth. This year we are focusing on some of the central ethical challenges and dilemmas facing the art institution today. In the early 21st century, a series of marked social, political and economic changes have had a significant impact on the infrastructure and dynamics of the art world. The impact has been acutely felt by Western art institutions, which are under pressure from cutbacks in state funding, increased competition, demands to increase visitor numbers, new communication and public participation initiatives, earmarked private funding, and a more prevalent experience and project culture. These and other changes have brought the issue of the role and activities of art institutions to the fore – including their responsibility and obligations as mediator between a still broader range of stakeholders and funding bodies whose interests rarely coincide. In this complex and conflict-ridden arena, it has be-
come crucial not only to identify, but also to reconsider and reformulate the ethical basis and scope of the art institution to retain its relevance in the society of the future. During these two days we will map out some of the most pressing ethical implications and challenges facing the work of institutions today. Is it possible to balance being both an enlightenment project and business without compromising either professional standards or financial accountability? How can the integrity of art be retained in the face of catering to the needs of private sponsors and the public? What is the role of communication and PR in this context – and what constitutes good, respectful communication? What effect have these developments had on curation and the relationship to artists and their interests? Questions like these form the core of the conference, at which professionals from a range of disciplines from Denmark and abroad will offer their views and experiences as a basis to discuss what a new, contemporary code of ethics for the art institution might look like – and how it can be implemented in practice.
Saturday 28 November 10am Welcome and introduction by Anna Holm and Merete Jankowski
Curation and the Collaboration With the Artist 10am Marianne Torp: Artists’ Projects In the Context of the Art Historical Museum
Art Institutional Ethics in Theory and Practice
10.30am Andreas Schlaegel: Reclaim Social Media
10.15am Sonja Lavaert: The Tragic Aporia of Art and Institutions
11am Coffee break
10.45am Irene Campolmi: Contemporary Aesth-Ethics – The Ethical Turn In 21st Century Art Institutions 11.15am Coffee break 11.30am Alistair Brown: Museum Ethics: Lessons for Contemporary Art?
11.15am Angelo Romano & Linda Jensen: Betwixt and Between – ABCs by Counter Space 11.45am Ann Demeester: Between a Rock and a Hard Place – On (self-) censorship and curatorial impotence 12.15pm Panel discussion
12pm Carsten Juhl: The Possibility of an Internal Exile
12.45pm Lunch
12.30pm Panel discussion
Mediation and the Audiences of the Art Institution
1pm Lunch 1.45pm Julia Schäfer: Mediation as Curatorial Practice The Art Institution Between Enlightenment Project and Contemporary Business 2pm Christine Buhl Andersen: Strategies for Re-branding a Museum – Between Local Skepticism and International Potential 2.30pm Signe Meisner Christensen: Virtuosity and Project Culture in Art Museums – Or the Art of Mediating Between Public Engagement and Immaterial Consumption
2.15pm Ben Street: Mediating Contemporary Art 2.45pm Coffee break 3pm Elin Lundgren: Performance under Focus 3.30pm Panel discussion
3pm Coffee break 3.15pm Dave Beech: Art and Ethics
Moderator: Merete Jankowski, director of Overgaden
3.45pm Bettina Pehrsson: What Are We Good At and What Are We Good For?
The conference series is organised by Overgaden’s curator Anna Holm.
4.15pm Panel discussion
Sunday 29 November
Abstracts Sonja Lavaert The Tragic Aporia of Art and Institutions In this paper Sonja Lavaert will present the thesis that politics and art are characterised by the same tragic aporia. The power at stake in both always contains a specific antinomy. This premise will be corroborated with an analysis by Virno, who considers the aporetic nature of both institutions and art as a chance to overcome the current problems of capitalist society and power relations related to this type of society. His analysis is supported by a theory of human nature and by a theory of creativity. The thesis will be further elaborated by the use of Agamben’s research on the structure of the artwork, human work in general, and human nature, which he illustrates by invoking the formula of creativity of Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’. Art is the antidote of capitalist production, which is now occupying space and denying humanity. As an exercise in contingency, art creates a place in time.
Sonja Lavaert is a philosopher and Italianist. She is professor of modern philosophy, Italian studies, political theory and philosophy of language and art at the Free University of Brussels. She is the author of Het perspectief van de multitude (2011) and has written about political philosophy, philosophy of art, and contemporary radical thought. Her research looks into the philosophical representation of history and the genealogy of political ethical concepts in the interdisciplinary area of philosophy, language, translation, art, and literature.
Irene Campolmi Contemporary Aesth-Ethics – The Ethical Turn In 21st Century Art Institutions In recent years, art institutions have re-conceptualised ethics in relation to both artistic and curatorial practice, emphasising the need for connecting curatorial experiments with society at large. Ethics has become a means for art museums to examine their social, cultural and aesthetic role as platforms for critical reflection, individual and collective cultivation and as democratic ‘spaces of action’. This paper explores the ethical dimensions of the art museum nowadays from an institutional, curatorial and research perspective. It will investigate how, in the last fifteen years, the emphasis of art institutions on issues like sustainability, accountability and responsibility has impacted both the institutional philosophy and the curatorial and research approach. Art institutions are assigning to ethics the role that aesthetics held once in describing the plurality of narratives, histories and representations which inhabit the contemporary world. Contemporary
aesthetics seem, in some cases, to be more focused on the aesthetics of the social, cultural and ethical effects that works of art and exhibitions generate in the actual context and historical time where they are shown. The ethics art institutions are addressing cannot be described just in Aristotelian terms, as the mode of ‘acting in a good way’. Rather, the ethics of art institutions’ are closer to Alain Badiou’s philosophical understanding of ethics, which considers the latter as a ‘good way of being’, but only in connection to the particularity of the political, historical and cultural contexts in which art institutions are embedded. For the 21st century art institutional ethics refer to that mode of ‘being and acting in a good way’, but in relation to the contingency of the circumstances. For example, this entails involving the audience in the co-curation of the exhibition contents and in public programmes despite the research quality of the outcome or
accepting funding from private sponsors who are not in the business of ethics. Irene Campolmi is PhD fellow at Aarhus University and researcher at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art since 2013, where she leads the research project The Art Museum of the 21st Century. She is also associated scholar to the Max-Planck-Research Group ‘Objects in the Contact Zone: The Cross-Cultural Life of Things’ and associate researcher at Kunsthal Aarhus. In 2014, she was visiting scholar at the School of Museum Studies in Leicester under mentorship of Dr. Janet Marstine and
in 2015 she has been J-1 visiting scholar at The Graduate Centre CUNY following the curatorial practicum course held by Claire Bishop and Kathrine Carl. She has worked at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and at GALLERIA CONTINUA in San Gimignano. She is one of the organizers of the international conference Between the Discursive and the Immersive: A Symposium on Research in the 21st Century Art Museums that will take place on 3-4 December 2015 at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with Stedelijk Museum and Aarhus University.
Alistair Brown Museum Ethics: Lessons for Contemporary Art? The question of ethics has long concerned museums, and the sector has codified its ethics for many decades. The Museums Association has recently published a new, updated Code of Ethics for Museums in the UK to reflect contemporary concerns. This session will look at how and why the Code was updated, what the implications are for the sector, and will examine some of the implications for contemporary art.
Alistair Brown is Policy Officer at the Museums Association, where he has been responsible for a range of museum policy initiatives including: Museums Change Lives, an initiative which supports museums to deliver social impact in their local communities; the first major revision of the Code of Ethics for Museums in the UK since 2002; and the Museums Association’s campaign to reduce the impact of public funding cuts on museums in the UK. He holds an MA in French and International Relations from Aberdeen University and has worked previously for the Scottish Government, the European Commission, and in the private sector.
Carsten Juhl The Possibility of an Internal Exile In this presentation Carsten Juhl will explore the field between what he calls snuff democracies of the West and the encumbering crisis of the revolutionary movements around the Mediterranean Sea and elsewhere. Furthermore, he will address actual questions concerning artistic authorship and modalities of animosity.
Carsten Juhl is Associate Professor and head of the Master’s programme in Art Theory and Communication at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He graduated with an MA in History and Italian from Copenhagen University and has been a lecturer in art and communication at the Royal Danish Academy’s Schools of Visual Art since 1990 and Head of the Department of Theory and Communication since 1996. Carsten Juhl is the editor of the Schools of Visual Art’s journal Hæfter for Gæstfrihed (‘Hospitality Pamphlets’), and has published books on Italy, political economy, art theory, and aesthetics.
Christine Buhl Andersen Strategies for Re-branding a Museum – Between Local Skepticism and International Potential KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces has undergone a process of rapid and far-reaching evolution since 2007. This holds true for all aspects of the museum’s activities: the nature and scope of its content production, research and exhibitions, the number of visitors attracted, the number of initiatives launched, and the museum’s finances. The changes have been carried out while maintaining the museum’s very specific specialist scope and while occupying a location outside the capital of Denmark. Christine Buhl Andersen will speak about her strategic approach to working with the various opportunities the museum’s unique position offered for such development and growth; she will also speak about her view of the future – locally, nationally and internationally – against the backdrop of a complex setting that involves stakeholders and expectations of very different kind as well as intense competition.
Christine Buhl Andersen is director of KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, one of the few museums in the world dedicated to this specific field. She holds an MA in literature and art history, a master degree in museology, and has completed an executive education programme for museum leaders at The Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University in California. Christine Buhl Andersen is a member of the Board of Directors of the Ny Carlsberg Foundation; previous notable posts include those of chairman of the Association of Danish Museums (ODM) and chairman of the Danish Arts Foundation’s Committee for International Visual Arts.
Signe Meisner Christensen Virtuosity and Project Culture in Art Museums – Or the Art of Mediating Between Public Engagement and Immaterial Consumption This paper presents results from Signe Meisner Christensen’s PhD dissertation No Soul for Sale, The Contemporary Art Museum as a Site of Immaterial Production. In the dissertation she has explored how art museums engage with contemporary art as a strategy to address political and social urgencies in contemporary society. The notion of the project format thus points to a set of concerns that are issue-driven, relating to temporary and performative events, and which integrate into its very mode of communication an explicit engagement with actualisation and audiences. The paper discusses two recent examples of this tendency, one at MoMA (2010) and one in Berlin (2010), focusing on how these two events employ curatorial procedures that are explicitly self-critical and which engage with ethical issues – ethical being here a notion relating to issues of equality and democratic responsibility of institutions. However, when investigating these examples further, it becomes apparent that the curatorial work that
goes into these art events virtuously coordinates between incongruous meanings and interests. This observation invites a discussion of the increasingly complex political function of curating as it serves to mediate the ambivalent demands of, on the one hand, public engagement and, on the other hand, commercialisation that are at work in the art institution today. Signe Meisner Christensen is a postdoc researcher in contemporary art, curatorial studies, and institutional transformation. Currently she is working on a research project on institutional transformation and democratic participation. She holds a PhD in the field of contemporary art and curatorial studies from Aarhus University and teaches at the Department of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. Engaging also in art criticism at Kunsten. nu and independent curatorial projects, she is occupied with the present extra-disciplinary explorations taking place in the field of art.
Dave Beech Art and Ethics Dave Beech will develop a critical survey of the recent ‘ethical turn’ in contemporary art. Alongside the ethics of representation, the ethics of participation and the ethics of sustainability we now have the ethics of ‘art washing’ and the ethics of internships as well as the ethics of pedagogy and the ethics of the art boycott. The art world has been transformed into an ethical universe. Drawing on Judith Butler, Simon Critchley, Iris Marion Young and Alain Badou, Beech will explore how ethics is both a form of accountability in which subjects are judged according to the judgments they make, and also a motivational force that demands the individual to act. The ethics that has taken over contemporary art is shown to be either a weak version of moral action or a strong version of ethical consumerism. Dave Beech is Professor of Art at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. He is an artist
in the collective Freee (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan), as well as a writer and curator. His work has been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial and the Liverpool Biennial as well as BAK, Utrecht; Wysing Arts, Cambridge; SMART Project Space, Amsterdam; the ICA, London; Centro Cultural, Montehermoso, Vitoria, Spain; the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; International Project Space, Birmingham, and 1000000mph Gallery, London. He has written widely on the politics of art, including Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics, Brill, 2015; Art and Text, Blackdog Books, 2011, and The Philistine Controversy, Verso, 2002, co-authored with John Roberts. He is a founding co-editor of the journal Art and the Public Sphere and has curated the exhibition We Are Grammar at the Pratt Institute in New York in 2011 (co-curator Paul O’Neill).
Bettina Pehrsson What Are We Good At and What Are We Good For? In her presentation Bettina Pehrsson will discuss possible strategies for how small- and mid-sized contemporary art institutions can survive and generate continuity, depth and a long term vision in a situation where cultural policy is increasingly defined by project funding, short-sightedness and instrumental demands.
Bettina Pehrsson is director of Marabouparken Konsthall. She gained her BA in Art History at Lund University in Sweden and at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Previously she was artistic director of Krognoshuset in Lund and has worked at Galerie Nordenhake in Stockholm and Berlin and as a freelance curator. From 2005 to 2007 she was acting director for IASPIS. Additionally, Bettina Pehrsson is one of the founders of Antenna, an agency, production company and publishing house (together with Katinka Ahlbom), and Parallel Film, a production company for art films (together with Miriam Bäckström). She has also been engaged in the interdisciplinary network and arena for film and design Designfilmpool (2004–2005).
Marianne Torp Artists’ Projects In the Context of the Art Historical Museum For more than a decade, Marianne Torp has been curating solo shows and new commissions by contemporary artists in the National Gallery of Denmark. In this paper she will elaborate on the situation and the role of the artist within the organisational framework of the art historical institution. What are the challenges of accommodating contemporary art production within this context? How can the ideas of the artists be facilitated and how can the expectations of the institution be balanced against the intentions of the artist? Throughout the presentation she will focus on how the artist – showing and producing within the museum – is potentially affecting it structurally. Furthermore she will discuss the role of the curator sandwiched between the artist’s needs on one hand and the institution’s struggle to meet public and political requirements on the other.
Marianne Torp is chief curator of contemporary art at SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. She is responsible for SMK’s contemporary art programme x-rummet and has curated numerous new commissions, most recently with Lutz Bacher, 201415; Henrik Olesen, 2014; and Haim Steinbach, 2014. In 2014 she curated a survey exhibition of the work of Elmgreen and Dragset. She has also co-curated Danh Vo’s solo exhibition in the Danish Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015.
Andreas Schlaegel Reclaim Social Media In the mutually interdependent stabilisation process of the art world, public institutions also represent contemporary perceptions as well as future visions for arts and artists. Based on this notion Andreas Schlaegel will address questions such as: What is the shape of art to come, what space is it given to perform its value, be it aesthetic, social, economical or magic? And what do we want from the artists; should they enact roles of entrepreneurs, creative practitioners, aesthetic activists or geniuses? And where to have this discourse? How about online? In his presentation Schlaegel will make a proposition for an open online laboratory on art, critique and the web.
Andreas Schlaegel is active as artist, critic and curator, working from Berlin. He contributes regularly to various international art magazines, including Frieze d/e, Flash Art, Spike, and Billedkunst, and his essays on contemporary art have been published in publications by various art institutions in Europe and the US. Currently he is developing an open online lab for critique at the HfBK Hamburg in collaboration with Hamburg Open Online University.
Angelo Romano & Linda Jensen Betwixt and Between – ABCs by Counter Space There is a proliferation of off spaces, alternative spaces, and independent spaces - not only in Switzerland. Based on the turn to creative industries with its explicit business dogma, many forms of creativity in the arts seem to be fostered. Still, the ensuing build-up towards hyper-capitalism puts a pressure on these. We realize we do not function better because of ‘the system,’ but because we often depend upon precarious work and affective relations. It is artists, co-workers, helpers, and friends – who show solidarity with our idealism. Their time and engagement unwillingly becomes human capital. On the other hand, investors in the arts seek return of interest and profit; public foundations slowly move in the same direction through the professionalisation of grant procedures and their quest for private funding. The notion of art as a public good sees itself caught in the straightjacket of a quasi-professionalised, individualistic, privatised ideology. What seems necessary now are critical reminders and different forms of solidarity. Historically, independent spaces have been breeding grounds for experimentalism, often remaining at a distance from mainstream circuits. However, is it even decidedly possible, viable and
wise for these ’ungovernables’ to exist at a distance today? In other words, can an independent art space remain free from the enterprise culture and still have bearing and relevancy? In our presentation, we will not present solutions but a cartography in the form of an ABC of our mind-scape to offer grounds for debate. Angelo Romano founded the exhibition space Counter Space in 2013. Angelo Romano has realised projects in Poland, Shanghai and Switzerland. Angelo Romano was curating one of the programmes of the Swiss Pavilion at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. His Master thesis was centered around homosexuality and postcolonialism in Chinese cities. Linda Jensen is curator at Counter Space and project associate at the Zurich University of the Arts for the project Draft. Linda Jensen has realised projects in Hong Kong, Paris and Copenhagen. She is co-editor of Torrent, a magazine focusing on source materials by artists. She studied at Parsons School of Design in Paris and New York. She was previously assistant curator at Burger Collection, Hong Kong.
Ann Demeester Between a Rock and a Hard Place – On (self) censorship and curatorial impotence In certain extreme situations – censorship, (labour) conflicts, media outrage – artist and curator are ’pitted’ against each other within an institutional framework and loyalties seem confused. How can curators continue to facilitate and (critically) support artists’ ideas, intentions and projects ’under pressure’? Starting from two specific case-studies Ann Demeester will explore what pitfalls can arise and what mechanisms can be developed to cope with and potentially obliterate obstacles that compromise and complicate the triangular relationship between artist, curator/director and institution.
Ann Demeester is the director of the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem. From 2006 to 2014 she was director of de Appel arts centre Amsterdam, head of de Appel’s Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam, and co-founder of the Gallerist Programme with the Fair Gallery. She was on the editorial board of the magazines Yang, A Prior Magazine F.R. David, and has published essays on Michael Borremans, Jennifer Tee, Salla Tykka, Sung Hwan Kim and Richard Hawkins. She co-curated the 10th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius in 2009 and hosts the Dutch TV programmes 4Art and Opium. Previously Demeester was director of W139, Amsterdam; assistant curator at SMAK, Ghent, and deputy director at Museum MARta Herford, where she organised exhibitions of works by Luc Tuymans, Raoul De Keyser, Rui Chafes, Royden Rabinowitch, Rob Birza, Joe Scanlan, and Bjarne Melgaard.
Julia Schäfer Mediation as Curatorial Practice Since the beginning of her career, Julia Schäfer has been following the idea of ‘curating as an educational practice’ according to which the borders between mediation, curating and artistic practices are fluent. In this presentation she will give an introduction to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig and its various accesses to artistic works and curatorial approaches exemplified by four experimental exhibitions: 1) A long-term exhibition with ten different groups examining the collection of the museum; 2) An artistic project by Katerina Seda at the GfZK, working with six teenagers from a small village next to Brno; 3) A stage-like, environmental exhibition produced with two stage-designers and a dance-theatre production; and 4) The International Village Show in the garden of the museum. And additionally: Maybe a curatorial intervention in a bank and an intervention of the bank in the museum.
Julia Schäfer is trained as an art mediator and artist. Since 2001 she has been curator and art mediator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, and since 2006 she has been teaching at the art academy Burg Giebichenstein in Halle. In 2000 she was an assistant at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and from 1999 to 2001 she was working as a freelancer at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. She has curated exhibitions at NGBK, Berlin; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, and P74 in Ljubljana.
Ben Street Mediating Contemporary Art As a term, ‘mediation’ has roots in conflict resolution, whereby a mediator acts as middleman between two opposing points of view. In the context of contemporary art, mediation might be seen as an attempt to forge common ground between audience and object, and as in conflict resolution, ideal mediation hides itself. Mediation can take numerous forms, from guided discussion in the gallery, to wall labels, interpretative materials, and even curatorial strategies. All of these approaches ought, in an ideal scenario, to encourage and enhance the public experience of works of art. At their worst, though, they can obscure meaning, cloud comprehension in esoteric language, and reinforce barriers to learning that museums ought to focus on collapsing. Mediation, then, stands for the first point of contact between public and institution, and as such has crucial importance in the dialogue between the two. This presentation will present mediation as a delicate balance between clarity and obfuscation.
Ben Street is a freelance art historian, lecturer and educator based in London. He teaches on courses in modern and contemporary art history for Christies Education and Sotheby’s Institute of Art and runs his own courses for adults in engaging with contemporary art, which include guided trips abroad. As a gallery educator, he has worked for the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York and is both an educator and mentor for trainee teachers for the National Gallery. In 2014 he ran mediation training for Manifesta in the Hermitage, St Petersburg. He is the co-founder and co-director of Sluice, a biennial platform for artist-run galleries, which has taken place in London since 2011. Ben Street is the author of numerous essays for museum publications, has written scripts for audio tours of major exhibitions, and has presented programmes on modern and contemporary art for BBC Radio 4.
Elin Lundgren Performance under Focus Lilith Performance Studio is an independent platform for practical artistic research focusing on visual art performance. The studio originates new large-scale performances by inviting visual artists to create pieces in a close collaboration with the studio – from conceptualisation to presentation. Since its inception in 2007, Lilith Performance Studio has produced 40 projects with artists from around the world. As a production space and an arena for visual art performance, the studio is the first of its kind in the world. In this presentation artistic director, Elin Lundgren, will talk about the studio’s approach to the production of works as well as its strategies and thoughts behind how to ‘prepare’ the audience for entering and experiencing a performance, including how the studio works with communication and mediation.
Elin Lundgren is an artist and the founder and artistic director together with Petter Pettersson of Lilith Performance Studio in Malmö.
The conference is supported by:
Overgaden is supported by: Overgaden. Institute of Contemporary Art Overgaden neden Vandet 17 DK-1414 Copenhagen K www.overgaden.org +45 32 57 72 73