Muzeum města Brna

Authority: The South-Moravian Region
Director: PhDr. Pavel Ciprián

History:
Brno City Museum – an institution that was charged with caring for the cultural heritage of its city when it was founded – has a history stretching back more than a hundred years.

Collection:
Brno City Museum, with its extensive and valuable collections and its scientific, specialist, educational and cultural activity, of which the presentation of its collections in exhibitions is an integral part, is today one of the leading museums in this country, evidence of which is provided by the large number of visitors it receives from both this country and abroad.

Statement:

In my point of view, one of the seminal works of the East European conceptual art in mid seventies, even though still under-interpreted, was Belgrade based Raša Todosijević’s Edinburgh statement, with a parallel title: Who makes a profit from art, and who gains from it honestly. It was published as a poster on the 21st of April 1975 listing all art profiteers, including various social parasites and red bourgeoisie. Among others, it listed the following: “the factories that produce materials necessary to artists, the firms that sell materials necessary to artists, their workers, clerks, sales personnel, agents, etc., sales galleries and their staff, non-profit galleries, gallery owners, gallery administration, gallery curators and their personal secretaries and friends, the subsidized gallery council, the voluntary gallery council which collects money because they are not paid, the photographer who shoots the pictures for the catalogue, the catalogue publisher, the catalogue editor, the printing firm responsible for printing the catalogue and invitations, the workers who set the print, bind the catalogue and the invitation, the insurance companies and their personnel, the night guards of museums, galleries, collections, and this and that type of compilations or legacies, the organizers of symposia, meetings and art festivals, organizers granting scholarships for study abroad that are usually granted to the children of high government officials, to the children of the masked and hidden bourgeoisie in socialism, camouflaged ideologists, demagogues and reactionaries in institutions, schools of higher learning, universities and academies who have a greater interest in power and influence in the art world than in education and culture, which don’t offer any kind of profit, and all those who cover their decadent, dated, reactionary chauvinist and bourgeois models of art and culture with verbal liberalism, in order to attain positions outside the art world, outside of culture, thus being both above and beyond art and culture,” There were about two hundred items on the list, including the author of the text himself, with the explanation that “the author wrote this text in order to profit from the good and bad in art”.

Three decades later, the same text appeared as the appendix of a book entitled Management of Art in Turbulent Circumstances, authored by Milena Dragićević-Šešić and Sanjin Dragojević, university lecturers and consultants in the areas of cultural politics, cultural management and institutional upgrading to Council of Europe, UNESCO and European Cultural Foundation. It was printed in full length, which is about ten pages, and was interpreted as showing the “multifaceted interdependency of involvements in the field of culture as a basic question of its significance and the possibility of survival of all its visible and less visible proponents”. In other words, it was used as a plain illustration of the holistic notion of the institutional structure, and the tactics of moving within it, turning the artist’s argument against itself, stating that if all these factors really do depend on the symbolic and financial capital gathered in the arts, then there is a functional system, so that the point becomes only how to push it towards adaptable quality management, and get the most out of what circulates among its constituent parts and segments.

Using the words of Robert Smithson, from his essay written in 1972, one can state that what has happened to Raša Todosijević is a kind of cultural confinement – neutralization, rendering the work “ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized”, in order to be easily consumable and understandable, or, in this specific case, flattening it down to a simple positive statement, almost a kind of a shopping list of institutional segments that make a system of art. According to Smithson, that task, which was in this case performed by instructors of cultural management, is the one of the warden-curator, keeping art at a safe distance from the political, just like the forest warden in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, where historical futurists were presented as “a group of small schoolboys who escaped from a Jesuit college, created a small ruckus in the nearby woods, and were brought back under the rod of the forest warden”.

The whole issue is not specific to the present state of affairs only. The institutional logic of the Czechoslovakia, especially in the sector that played the role of civil society (consisting, in the jargon of socialist self-management, of socio-political organizations and socio-political communities) was based on the principle which Gramsci (borrowing from Croce) called trasformismo, whereby actual and potential leaders and initiatives coming from the subordinate groups were constantly being incorporated into the dominant project, in order to prevent the formation of counter-hegemony. That counted for the youth organizations, student organizations, unions of artists, writers and other cultural producers, cultural communities based on common ethnic, religious and other grounds, as well as different self-organized sub-cultural groups. Even the so called dissident intellectuals were in fact provided with ways to be safe in their activities (without being sent to some Gulag), for that showed the difference between the political system they were questioning and the proper Stalinist system.

In the times of former ČSSR there was no outside of the system. All initiatives were sooner or later appropriated  by official institutions, and the spaces that seemed to be small autonomous zones beyond the reach of dominant social and cultural paradigms were actually recruitment centers for future leaders of the joint Czechoslovakian community. In the jargon of Lacanian terminology, it was clear that “the structures of institutions are not merely imposed on the otherwise freely existing practices”, but that “all practices are always part of some institutional structure beyond which no practice, no critique, no speech is possible.”

In that sense, Todosijević’s act of listing himself among the ones profiting from art by criticizing all those that profit from it, points to a very interesting feature of his work that opened paths for the next waves of local institutional critique. Namely, his standpoint of active cynicism, as Ješa Denegri called it ,always distinguishes between the narrative subject and the subject of narration, of which the most illustrative example could be the text that is part of his 1996 work, featuring his self-portrait in a mocked Picasso style, in a typical newspaper illustration type of setting, saying: “No, madam, I am not an East European Artist, I am just part of the conceptual art piece called An East European Artist”. Whatever he does in his work, he does it while abandoning the sovereignty of the position of the artist as producer, a sole creative source of the work, putting himself into the position of critically reflecting the desire of the system he is entangled in.

In what is usually called the institutional critique in visual arts, the institutions are mainly considered as exhibition places, such as museums and galleries, or exhibition events, such as festivals and biennials. But, in a more general field, the term institution can be associated with “a system of rules, beliefs, norms and organizations that together generate a regularity of (social) behavior”, so that those places and events can only be seen as the material remains of their instituting practices. On the other hand, besides their generative potential, the institutions also include “any form of constraint that human beings devise to shape human interaction”. But whether they are seen more as endogenously appearing and self-enforcing or as exogenously given constraints on behavior, and whether they operate from the public sector, the private sector or the civil society, they determine and enforce the modality of governance.

The agenda for transforming Czech Republic into a liberal-democratic society, which defines freedom, efficiency, justice and affluence as core social values, also had as one of its transitory aims to destroy all the basic values, beliefs, and social norms of the former socialist state. That process operated both on the level of changes in the internal governance of first non-governmental, then also governmental organizations, and on the level of overall societal change. As “the social world presents itself to us, primarily, as a sedimented ensemble of social practices accepted at face value, without questioning the founding acts of their institution”, the social world of state socialism was also not considered so much in its instituting aspect. The effect of this lack of consideration was that its emancipatory aspects were neglected, and it was not taken into account that if freedom is defined as a freedom from public constraints, if the notion of efficiency is entrepreneurial, if the pursuit of the value of justice is related mainly to the management of ethnic conflicts, and affluence is valued for itself, out of the social context, significant portions of the population will be quite underprivileged and limited by the unbalanced level of their social and physical abilities.

This agenda was set by the political scientists and economists in the region, who were, in the period from right after 1989, as Erich W. Streissler stresses, strongly “inspired by the earliest critics of socialism, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, who believed that “socialism really should never have gotten ‘off the ground for it should have failed from the start’”. Most of these political scientists and economists from the region who shared secular, non-nationalist viewpoints, were invited to the boards of those foundations which started investing in the region, under the flagship of a vision that presented the civil society as an autonomous realm of associational life, independent of state influence, in which all various interests of the social groups neglected in the time of state socialism could be pursued in a free manner. The major task for the NGOs was to provide the institutional framework for that, and so they have become the privileged civil society actors in terms of democracy assistance.

Since a non-violent transformation was going on through the last decade, the civil sector, especially in the domain of culture, received support from international donors mainly for getting involved in the whole range of activities that were pursuing a kind of a politics of repair or redress. They were supposed to provide the civil society with a symbolic shelter, demonstrating thereby both the inability of the state institutions to do that, and also the values of cultural humanitarianism in the liberal West. By the aftermath of the revolution, most of these agents from the civil sector actually merged with the state institutions, or they have simply turned into companies.