The Regional Fine Arts Gallery in Zlín
Authority: The Zlín Region
Director: PhDr. Ludvík Ševeček
History:
The Zlín State Gallery was founded in 1953 as a regional gallery, temporarily residing in the chateau in Kroměříž. In 1957 the Gallery moved to Zlín to the House of the Arts (formerly a Memorial to Tomáš Baťa). In 1960 it found additional premises on the 2nd floor of the chateau in Zlín. The gallery rests in these two buildings up until the present.
Collection:
The core of the gallery collections was made up of part of the private Salus collection. Further items came about from acquisitions at the Zlín salons from 1936 until 1948 and works from the circle of the Zlín Art School, between 1939-1945. Since the mid 1950s the Gallery is fully in charge of its collections and continues to systematically expanding.
Statement:
Extracts from an interview with Ludvík Ševeček (LŠ) by the magazine Prostor Zlín (PZ)
PZ: We would like to start with your views on trajectories and effects of critical art practices in the last decades within crucial transformations of contemporary capitalism. There is a certain paradoxical constraint for the production of criticism in the contemporary politico-cultural setting of neoliberalism. It is almost a “systemic requirement” that artistic production has to be “socially aware”, i.e. to be pro-active in respect of dominant cultural policy, consistent with various contemporary relationalist theories. Substantial professionalism and expertise are required to be competitive on the intellectual market…
LŠ: You touch a crucial point, but I would conceptualize the relation between power and resistance, between critique and its appropriation, between political art practices and their spectacularization in a more complex way. Now, with the radical development of official cultural policies during the last years, especially but not only of the Blairist/British kind, openly instrumentalizing creativity for economic development, art for social integration, this critique of the 1990s becomes all the more urgent. But at the same time in all my own texts – and that also takes up the tradition of Benjamin referring to Brecht and Tretyakov – I felt the need to stress that there are certain practices of immanent transgression, certain strategies of autonomous self-instrumentalization and transversal concatenations of arts and politics that try to thwart the logics of neo-liberal social and cultural policies. This is important, because I am afraid that, without considering this other side of the coin, the type of discourses such as those occuring in your introduction (“art is forced to be political, socially engaged”) in my opinion represents the cry against the loss of autonomy that art is supposed to have and therefore, in fact (etc., it loses its autonomy”) tends to re-affirm a reactionary structure. All too often undifferentiating critics repeat the old figure of art being instrumentalized by politics and quickly equate certain problematic relational and community art practices with the very different practices of intervention art, communication guerrilla and activist approaches that apply fundamentally different methods. One could explain the enormous difference of these art practices in terms of the relationship of sociality and spatiality; whereas the former impel identitarian and communitarian strategies, seeking to redistribute and apporpriate space, the latter tend to distribute themselves in space without fixing the space as antecedent, stable and hierarchical. When these two completely different policies are blurred, whether out of ignorance or maliciousness, this lays the foundation for carrying out an all- encompassing criticism of every form of activist art, whether it is soft or hard, structure- or machine-like, striating the space or producing it. On the basis of this reduction and confusion, it becomes easy to criticize activist art practices on the whole and revoke a (re-)turn from the process to the object, from the performative to the pictorial – very similar to Greenberg and Fried some decades ago. Today this comes with the rehashed conceptual tools of the aesthetics of the 18th and 19th centuries (autonomy, beauty, aesthetic experience, etc.). In the cases of documenta X and 11, for instance, many commentaries denounced their allegedly exaggerated austerity and excessive emphasis on politics and discourse. And as an effect of this discursive shift in the art field you can experience the return of autonomy and beauty also in some of the talks and interviews of documenta 12 (director Roger Buergel).
PZ: Quite often the complex question of institution is reduced to a simple opposition of an anarchistic full-frontal negation of any institutional framework and of intellectualist resignation over the all-pervasiveness of the institutions. This implies that the boundaries of an institution – in the narrow sense of “state apparatuses” – are easily detectable and unproblematic, and that, at the same time, institutions – in the broader sense of “socially organized and normatively regulated behavior” – are embedded deep in our everyday practices. Questions of abolishing the strict dichotomization of institutional (the “inside” which is state-administered) and non-institutional (the “outside” which is spontaneous or self-organized) were a significant part of the discussion dedicated to new forms of institutional critique. How do you see the “arts of governing” and the methods of social transformation within this setting?
LŠ: I think it is not sufficient to attack the various state apparatuses in an abstract negation, to regard social movements as the absolute “Other” of institutions (whether they are state bureaucracies, independent NGOs or autonomous self-organizations). Instead, it is crucial to conceptualize institutions and the critique of institutions on the same plane of immanence: so at the most general level it is not a question of imagining an absolute outside of institutions, but a question of the mutual interrelationship of institution and movement, machines and state apparatuses, and a question of how this relationship can be made productive in the sense of emancipatory policies and beyond the abrupt demarcation between the two poles. On the level of institutional critique as a practice the main topic is how to avoid closure and structuralization: If institutional critique is not to be fixed and paralyzed as something established in the art field and confined within its rules, then it has to continue to develop along with changes in society and especially to tie into other forms of critique both within and outside the art field, such as those arising in opposition to the respective conditions or even prior to their formations. Against the background of this kind of transversal exchange of forms of critique, but also beyond the imagination of spaces free from domination and institutions, institutional critique is to be reformulated as a critical attitude and as an instituent practice.
PZ: One essay that has been recently discussed in different contexts engaged with the relations of critique and institution, is Andrea Fraser’s “From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique”. Trying to articulate critical operations in art through the dichotomy of its externalization and internalization, Andrea Fraser recalls two modes of opposition of art and institution: the first relates to the attempts to “operate outside traditional institutions, with fiscal independence, beyond the legislative control of art experts” (which she connects to the so called first generation of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers etc.), and the second one which meets its (im-)possibility to escape processes of incorporation in the institutions and historical canonization. It is so, because the “institutionalized sites” are not only part of the governmental- administrative-institutional sphere, but the institution is performed by individuals and embodied in people who produce discourses and practices, recognize, interpret and evaluate – art as art. Therefore, she draws the conclusion that “institutional critique” has always been institutionalized because it emerged within art, within the institution of art actively or retroactively, and she illustrates this conclusion with the example of “the failure of avant-garde movements which didn’t destroy the institution of art, but extended it beyond the traditional
boundaries of specifically artistic objects and aesthetic criteria. Andrea Fraser’s essay offers some important points because it precisely describes the mechanisms of misappropriation of the notion of critique in contemporary art (especially neo-Fluxus, relational and “socially conscious” art), represented as a site of resistance and symbolic revolution and at the same time readily integrated in power structures and institutionalized criteria of success. On the other side, her question: Has institutional critique been institutionalized? can be posed only from the ideological position of modern expert society and enclosed disciplinary fields. It reduces and encloses process of governmentality in the art field, art world, or if you want, in the imaginary state of art. It is precisely this enclosure that poses itself as the central problem.
LŠ: This was a challenge for art practices since the 19th century, and with the German sociologist Ulf Wuggenig you could also argue that institutional critique has been a practice in the art field since then. On the other hand, these effects of power were never all-encompassing, and it has been tackled effectively over and over again. Fraser denies that: although there seems to be an echo of Foucault’s concept of self-government in her text, there is no indication of forms of escaping, shifting, transforming. Whereas for Foucault the critical attitude appears simultaneously as “partner” and as “adversary” of the arts of governing, the second part of this specific ambivalence vanishes in Fraser’s depiction, yielding to a discursive self-limitation, which only just allows reflecting on one’s own enclosure. Contrary to all the evidence of the manifold effectivity of critical art practices throughout the entire 20th century, she plays a worn-out record: art is and remains autonomous, its function limited to the art field. In my opinion Fraser conducts a practice of offensive self-historization and self-canonization, even trying to establish herself not only as a leading figure of the “second generation” of institutional critique, but also post-factumin a certain relation to the first. Instituent practices that conjoin the advantages of both “generations” of institutional critique will impel a linking of social criticism, institutional critique and self-criticism. This link will develop, most of all, from the direct and indirect concatenation with political practices and social movements, but without dispensing with artistic competences and strategies, without dispensing with resources of and effects in the art field.
PZ: Different Avant-garde, Situationist, Conceptualist or Interventionist art practices were extensively based on the strategies of cutting the distance between “art and life”, “performer and audience”, “gallery and street”. Instead of representing the world they were active in the world. They replaced the principle of searching for new modes of “depiction” with the principle of searching for the change in the production apparatus itself. In that sense Duchamp’s question “How do we make a work of art that is not a work of art?” still can be used to describe this shift.
LŠ: I do not really care for Duchamp’s question that also in its negation sticks to something like an essence of art. My question would be more of the kind: “What are the preconditions for art machines and revolutionary machines intertwining and forming transversal concatenations?” That also means – and I tried to show that by analyzing the examples of Richard Wagner’s and Anatoli Lunacharsky’s texts on art and revolution – that I am not into the game of dissolving the difference between art and life (not even as conceptualized by Joseph Beuys). Art that tends to lose itself in life usually ends up being a bit too grand. In the relevant main currents in the 1910s/20s and in the 1960s/70s it is evident that the general “vitalization” of art came to no good end: de-politicized drifting into hermetic pseudo-autonomies and the total heteronomization of art are only two sides of the same coin. In cultural-political endeavors that have ended up being too large and too abstract, the ideals of the inseparability of art and life, instead of questioning rigid boundaries between aesthetic and political practice, absolutized these boundaries or made them reoccur somewhere else. Contrary to models of totally diffusing and confusing art and life, I suggested to investigate other practices, those emerging in neighboring zones, in which transitions, overlaps and concatenations of art and revolution become possible for a limited time, but without synthesis and identification. Beyond de-differentiating and overloading art with the revolutionary pathos, questions can still be raised about the appropriate form of concatenation, which focus on more limited and more modest overlaps of art and revolution: How can this kind of overlapping be understood as a temporary alliance and exchange, and yet constantly and conflictually impel attacks on social power relations and internal structuralization at the same time? Instead of seeking to abolish representation in pure action and in abundant life, how can a critique of representation and an expansion of orgiastic representation be developed? Instead of the promises of salvation from an art that saves “life”, how can revolutionary becoming occur in a situation of the mutual overlapping of art and revolution that is limited in space and time?
PZ: Is it possible to talk about radical aesthetics and radical art through the lens of aesthetics and form? This question may seem contradictory, but it is on one hand historically rooted in radical avant-garde movements, implied by the motto “New art for new society”, and on the other hand incorporated in the more recent interpretations of art-activism and “interventionist art”. The act of “art” in activist- art theory – where in the book of Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution plays an important role – is closely linked to the act of “invention” and nonrepresentational imaginative processes. Creative or art production is explained as experimental territory for examination of new tactics, innovation of tools or invention of new skills for participation in the process of social transformation.
LŠ: Well, it is not so easy to answer this briefly, but I will try to extract some thoughts out of my own reading of Art and Revolution, mainly the question of how to shift from representing situations to constructing them. In the 1820s Hegel had taken the situation concept from the theatre discourse of the 18th century and introduced it in his Lectures on Aesthetics as a generalized key term applying to all art forms. What was specific about Hegel’s use of the situation concept was that he opened it up, initiating a movement with enough verve that the situation, based on its quality as an aesthetic category in Hegel’s use, enabling it to go beyond Hegel and beyond the framework of conventional aesthetics. The questions that Hegel raised on the relationship between representation and action led in the heterogenesis of concrete art practices in the 20th century from representing situations through various stations of expanding representation to its limits to constructing situations. The last phase is the most interesting (here Tretyakov, Eisenstein, Brecht and the S.I. are equally important), where the situation becomes orgiastic: Hegel’s Ungeheuer der Entzweiung(monster of disruption) slumbering in the general state of the world and dozing off again in the subsequent sublation of differences is to be treated here only in a waking state, or rather: as though it had never gone to sleep at all. Disruptive monsters do not emerge from the sleep of reason, they do not know the sleep of reason nor its dominion.
PZ: If we perceive liberalism as a governmental technique based on the economy of means, then contemporary post-welfare state capitalism, with its trend of cutting down state administration and its competencies has to put much more emphasis on the self-discipline of populations. Foucault’s concept of governmentality could be useful for an analysis of the organization of power-relations in contemporary capitalist society, with its thesis on interconnectedness of the disciplinary power and the bio-political, i.e. “state” power and various practices of self-care in the constitution of the subject (in both senses). How do you envision the practice of critique that escapes its adoption as a part of governmental technique? Moreover, how can it add to revolutionary practices of radical change?
LŠ: In his above mentioned essay about critique Foucault did not stop by conceptualizing governmentality as a dead end, an inescapable trap, but also put up a specific proposal concerning the concept of critique, of the critical attitude within the immanence of governmentality: instead of inducing the closure of the field with theoretical arguments and promoting this practically, thus carrying out the art of governing, a different form of art should be pushed at the same time which leads to escaping the arts of governing. And Foucault is not the only one to introduce these new non-escapist terms of escape. Figures of flight, of dropping out, of betrayal, of desertion, of exodus, these are the figures proposed – especially against cynical or conservative invocations of inescapability and hopelessness – by several authors as poststructuralist, non-dialectical forms of resistance. With these kinds of concepts Gilles Deleuze, Paolo Virno and other philosophers attempt to propose new models of non-representationist politics that can equally be turned against different problematic models of transformation of the past and the present – against Leninist concepts of revolution as taking over the state (instead of radically evading all forms of state apparatus), against naive anarchist positions imagining an absolute outside of institutions, as well as against concepts of transformation and transition in the sense of a successive homogenization in the direction of neo-liberal globalization. In terms of their new concept of resistance, the aim is to thwart a dialectical idea of power and resistance: to create a positive form of dropping out, a flight that is simultaneously an instituent practice. Instead of presupposing conditions of domination as immutable horizons or insurmountable walls and yet running against them, this flight changes the conditions under which the presupposition takes place.
PZ: Parrhesia appears as one of the essential concepts within Foucault’s researches at the beginning of the 1980s. It is in the center of his attempts to focus his work around what he called “techniques of the self” – differentiated and divergent hermeneutic practices of one’s own self that began to constitute themselves from classical and late Antiquity on. There is always a game of rhetorical and discursive negotiation that involves an almost obligatory duplicity in relationships between art-institutions and (activist) artists, or foundations and trustees. In that kind of situation, which most certainly plays a significant role in the reproduction of institutional authorities and hierarchies, parrhesia could be taken in its colloquial meaning – being imprudent or even reckless in conversation. Could you tell us a bit more about the strategies and effects of what is called “the double criticism of parrhesia”?
LŠ: “Double criticism of parrhesia” means that here we are not only talking about the old idea of parrhesia as publicly (in the Greek agora) speaking about everything, even or just when it is dangerous. This kind of parrhesia as a public, political practice is joined by a personal practice that becomes actualized in a specific form of relationship: Foucault developed this personal form of parrhesia as a concept of self-technique that does not serve as a catholic confession or examination of conscience nor as a prototype of Maoist self-criticism, but rather to establish a relationship between rational discourse and the lifestyle of the interlocutor or the self-questioning person. Contrary to any individualistic interpretation especially of later Foucault texts (imputing a “return to subject philosophy”, etc.), here parrhesia is not the competency of a subject, but rather a movement between the position that queries the concordance of logos and bios, and the position that exercises self-criticism in light of this query. Being imprudent or reckless in communication, like say Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz today, remains within the dialectics of the institution and its negation. Personally I am not very interested in these strategies of challenging museums or other art institutions. But when founding new institutions or experimenting on instituent practices, I would insist on what I wrote about the two faces of parrhesia, about the necessary intertwining of parrhesia as both radical social criticism and self-criticism. Critique is not exhausted in denouncing abuses, nor in withdrawing into more or less radical self-questioning. In terms of art practices, this means that neither the belligerent strategies of the institutional critique of the 1970s nor art as a service to the institution in the 1990s promise effective interventions into the governmentality of the present, but maybe it makes sense to think of combining both methods into the double criticism of parrhesia.