Erratum

Compensation Portrait: The New Europe. Culture of Mixing and Politics of Representation
Original Author: Marius Babias, 2005
Notable Changes: Berlin is changed to Prague. Germany changed to the Czech Republic.

Introduction

The Representing the Nation publication was prepared in relation to our participation in the International Triennial of Contemporary Art (ITCA) organized by Tomáš Vlček and Milan Knížák at the National Gallery (NG) in Prague in 2008. We were invited to create a new work.

We wanted to characterize the NG in Prague as an institution. In 2008 the NG was a member of the Association of Czech Galleries. We decided to visit all of its member institutions across the country during a six month period. This gave us an overview of topics, complications, facilities, and staff issues, including an understanding of the challenges the respective institutions face, in respect to the regional, economical, and historical collections of art for which they are responsible. How do they think about and reflect on their own practice? What kind of functions, positions, roles, or ambitions do they articulate?

Despite being dissatisfied with the research material, we made a decision to maintain the project’s original framework. We had anticipated more substantial visions or statements, so we applied an improvised strategy of so-called Compensation Portraits, inspired by a concept from the exhibition catalog First Papers of Surrealism held in New York in 1942. In this case, the surrealist painters were asked to bring photographs of people other than themselves to represent them in the publication. In this spirit, we selected theoretical texts on institutional critique from a range of international writers, translated these texts into Czech and presented them as texts from Czech institutions and their representatives.

The project as a whole was self-financed. The sponsors or partners whose logos are printed on page 59 at the end of the publication are all imaginary sponsors, themselves unaware of any seeming participation. Thus, the publication falsely takes on the form of a serious international cooperation between the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Practices (eipcp.net), the EU Education and Culture D6 Framework Program, the Association of Czech Galleries, the National Gallery Prague, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Prague, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and funded by the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank. This parody reflects the trend of corporate sponsorship supporting critical, progressive, intellectual, and autonomous initiatives within locations of their respective markets.

The Representing the Nation publication was immediately distributed to all of the represented institutions. The project was not appreciated by the organizers of the ITCA / NG, generally disappointed in not understanding the basic conceptual framework. They refused to cover production costs or to further communicate concerning the project. In addition, part of the publications went missing from the NG depository. Few institutions encouraged further dialogue, and there was limited interest by other representatives and researchers from various institutions in Prague.

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The Gallery of Fine Arts in Hodonín

Authority: The South-Moravian Region
Director: Mgr. Josef Fantura
Curator: PhDr. Ilona Tunklová

History:
The Gallery of Fine Arts in Hodonín was founded in 1960 as part of the network of regional galleries. It was housed at the so-called House of Artists, which formerly belonged to the Association of Moravian Artists (Sdružení výtvarných umělců moravských – SVUM).

Collection:
The gallery owns collections of Czech art from the first half of the 20th century, with special emphasis on the painting and sculptures of the founding generation of the Association of Moravian Artists. Part of the collection is the artistic legacy of Jakub Obrovský and Franta Uprka. Acquisitions of Czech art of the second half of the 20th century are intended, primarily, to show the development of fine arts in southeastern Moravia. The permanent exhibition of the Gallery is very much on line with this purpose. The Gallery also specialises in contemporary photography and modern Czech graphic art, with a special emphasis on the work of the young generation.

Statement:

As a general platform, what seems to be more and more important in our work is to recognize that Europe is an emerging superpower, and what does this mean for the development of democracy in general and for the status of culture in particular? The western democracies are in decline, according to Paolo Flores D’Arcais, Italian philosopher and editor of Italy’s most influential political periodical, MicroMega. D’Arcais sees the symptoms of this deterioration in, for example, the restriction of civil rights in the United States after 9/11 (Patriot Act) and the restriction of media pluralism in Italy by Silvio Berlusconi, but also the egoism of “identity movements” that place the justified struggle for their rights above the general good. Noam Chomsky also criticize the way the United States, as the guardian of capitalism, has mutated more and more from a citizens’ democracy into a “market democracy” dominated by neoliberal doctrines and tenets and serving the big corporations, whose hunt for profits, he says, is backed by American-controlled institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World trade Organization. A number of world wide resistance movements have sprung up in recent years, but the revitalization of democracy by the (anti-)globalization and anti-war movements must inevitably collide with the centralization of political power that the political elites are pushing for. The specters of the millennium-structural mass unemployment and “international terrorism”-especially, are instrumentalized for social discipline and would, given time, weaken the democratic forces.

The contour of the “new Europe” can be seen especially clearly in the cuts in welfare and social services currently being implemented across the Union, and also in migration policy, because that is where principles of social construction such as inclusion and exclusion of (cultural) identity and (ethnic) difference can be cemented in place. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, mass emigration terrified the western European industrial states – which is why the external borders has now been pushed back to the Baltic states. Within Europe, after 9/11 and the Madrid bombings, there is discussion of a series of new security laws, and the deployment of the army to maintain public security. Militarization is progressing apace. Europe, which gave birth to public space and the free city, is in the process of raising the state of emergency to the ruling paradigm of urban life.

Europe’s conurbations are turning into improvised high-security survival tracts. Unlike London (with 20,000 police on patrol) and Paris (3,000 police, paratroopers and foreign legionaries), Prague places less emphasis on the presence of police and army on the streets and more on advance information-collecting by the state security agencies, when fighting the specter of “international terrorism,” which is used as a synonym for “Islamic terrorism.” The attacks in New York and Madrid gave politicians the justification to welcome new criteria of exclusion: Muslim minorities living inside the EU-borders come under wholesale suspicion and are subjected to dragnet searches for “sleepers.”

While the political sphere formalizes the EU integration process as a geopolitical vision of a prospective greater Europe and forces norms on life and society (the new member states had to democratize their political systems on the western model, accept international rules of competition, and integrate thousands of European Union laws into their national legislation), the field of culture-wherever it connects with political and social resistance movements-has the potential to bring forth a perspective that treats the process of European unification as an opportunity for creating a critical Europe. The mixing process of culture and political resistance tends to generate three formats for activity, which interact and reinforce one another: activism as art form, cooperation between artists and activists, art as activist manifestation. We have to see artistic practice as a format for social activity-and not just as an outdated bourgeois form of gaining distinction. Seen this way, the artistic “work” is the starting point for an all-round examination of its own conditions of creation and existence and of its power in the production and reinforcement of pictures, images, and dispositives.

What measures are needed to break out of the politics of representation-and achieve self-liberation and self-empowerment? First of all, we must take up an elementary contradiction of the European Union unification process, namely, the wish to unify the territory of the Union in terms of economic, foreign, and security policy, while recognizing and preserving the asserted cultural diversity of it’s regions. Art and culture as counterproject residua are certainly not merely sounding boards for developments in society. Instead, they are actively involved in constructing a politics of representation, in which they participate in a double sense- as both producers and representatives. Europe’s much-trumpeted cultural diversity, which is supposedly richer than American pulp culture and therefore has to be protected, for example by introducing quotas, actually marks an explosive point in politics of representation- to be precise, the identity-forming moment of the European feeling of superiority over others.

At the same time, as the world’s biggest pop music fair and congress, Popkomm 2007, was in progress in Prague, the parliamentary committee on culture and the media and commission of inquiry on culture in the Czech Republic, held a joint hearing in the Parliament on the introduction of quota for Czech-language pop-music (Czech-pop) on the radio. Without meeting any real resistance, an alliance of aging punks, Greens, and cultural conservatives (that would be unthinkable ten years ago) joined forces against globalization, counterposing Czech diversity against Anglo-American monoculture. France introduced a radio quota of 40 percent for French -language music back in 1996. Nationalizing the identity of pop is a contradiction in itself, because pop has always been subject to a globalization process, which was indispensable in transforming national mono-cultures into intercultural diversity. In fact, the fascinating thing about the Czech-pop initiative is the claim that pop is a national cultural asset worthy of protection from a supposedly destructive globalized Anglo-American monoculture, and also the timing of the call for quotas, at a time when Europe is girding its loins to challenge the American superpower, the quota discussion appears in different light. The role of culture as co producer of a politics of representation is evident here.

Seen in this way the “cultural diversity” of Europe, which allegedly brings forth ever more finely differentiated versions of “difference” so as to provide access to the “Other,” turns out to be an ideological implant. In reality, however, all spheres of everyday life from culture to society are affected, changed, and manipulated by the liberalization and deregulation of trade and financial markets. The fact that culture, of all things, flourishes during the course of the EU unification process while social security systems are dismantled piece by piece under the heel of shareholder value, demonstrates the power of culture to the processes of greater European transformation, and to conceal them symbolically.

A critical “new Europe” that allow us to disentangle the ideology of the politics of representation could perhaps be found in the concept of a “culture of mixing,” (rather than a culture of representation or a “culture of purity”), which the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy formulated in his investigation of constructions of ethnic identity in the Yugoslavian wars. This “culture of mixing,” which is directed against the essentialization of “people,” “nation,” “civilization,” and “identity” can help to contribute new political landscapes, liberated identities, and options for action to help to Europe’s future self-identification. Visual art, in particular, is a frontier-crossing producer of thinking. Where they deal critically with the dynamics of the European unification process (a process that is currently tending to produce rather than eliminate contradiction), art and culture are identity-political producers of a psycho-geography named “New Europe.”