CULTURAL PRACTICE AND WAR
the summer of 1999 Artists, critics, curators, and other cultural producers
are today struggling with the terms of their own practice, in a global context
of crisis when much of their work seems insignificant. How to navigate this
relation between aesthetic and political intervention is a nagging question,
made all the more acute during times of war. What are the terms of our involvement
-- do we fight at the frontlines, do we devote ourselves to humanitarian efforts,
or do we rather make strong interventions in the realm of symbolic production?
Because clearly we are faced with wars of images, of communications networks
and propaganda machines. Where are we needed most? Have we developed useful
tools with which to decode images, that can have practical consequences in
a situation where television continually overwrites reality?
Recently an extraordinary thing has happened on the Internet.
As Robert Fleck has pointed out, it is the first time we have been able to
communicate nearly in realtime with people on the 'other side' of a war front.
The war in Yugoslavia has exposed the promise and limitations of the net and
has revealed anew the tangled intersections of representations, politics,
and histories that must be navigated in order to engage in effective cultural
practice. It has revealed many things about how such assemblages cross with
daily embodied realities, uprooting traditional formats of place, identity,
and geography especially during times of national and international crisis.
Working in areas of cultural production, we must learn to contend with the
new forms of cultural identification that are arising, with the faultlines
of ethnic tension that contest national borders, and with the underlying processes
of militarization.
The FORUM HOSTS:
ZDENKA BADOVINAC, Director of the Moderna Galerja, Ljubljana,
Slovenia; BART DE BAERE, organiser and writer, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele
Kunst, Ghent, Belgium; WAYNE BAERWALDT, independent curator in Winnipeg and
Santa Monica; CARLOS BASUALDO, poet and freelance curator, project director
of Apex Art Curatorial Projects, New York; DANIEL BIRNBAUM, Director of IASPIS,
Stockholm; WALING BOERS, curator and publicist, director of BüroFriedrich,
Berlin; FRANCESCO BONAMI, Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Chicago, Artistic Director Fondazione Sandretto ReRebaudengo per L'Arte, Torino,
and Artistic Director of Pitti Discovery, Florence; DAN CAMERON, Senior Curator
at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; CAROLYN CHRISTOV-BAKARGIEV,
art critic and independent curator, Rome; UTE META BAUER, curator and head
of the Institute for Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna;
CHRISTOPHE CHERIX, curator Cabinet des Estampes, Geneva; LISA CORRIN, Senior
Curator at Serpentine Gallery, London; JORDAN CRANDALL, artist and media theorist,
New York; AMADA CRUZ, Director of Exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial
Studies, Bard College, New York; OKWUI ENWEZOR, curator, Artistic Director
of Documenta XI; CHARLES ESCHE, writer and exhibition organiser, co-director
of The Modern Institute, Glasgow; ROBERT FLECK, independent critic, curator,
and director of the post-graduate program at the Ecole Regionale des Beaux-Arts
in Nantes; DOUGLAS FOGLE, Curator of Contemporary Art, Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis; JESUS FUENMAYOR, curator and writer, Caracas; BETTINA FUNCKE,
associate publications editor, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, and doctoral
candidate at ZKM Karlsruhe; REBECCA GORDON NESBITT, curator, founding member
of Salon3, London; HOU HANRU, independent critic and curator, Paris; SUSAN
HAPGOOD, Curator of Exhibitions, American Federation of Arts, and Senior Fellow,
Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, New York; MARIA HLAVAJOVA,
Director, Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, Bratislava, Slovakia; JENS HOFFMANN,
independent curator, New York; UDO KITTELMANN, Director, Kölnischer Kunstverein,
Cologne; VASIF KORTUN, writer, curator, educator, and founder of the Istanbul
Contemporary Art Project, Istanbul; MARTA KUZMA; CORNELIA LAUF, art historian
and curator, founder and director of Camera Oscura, San Casciano dei Bagni,
Tuscany; MARIA LIND, Curator of Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm;
ROSA MARTINEZ, historian, art critic and independent curator, Barcelona, and
curator of III International Site Santa Fe Biennial; LAURENCE MILLER, Founding
Director of ArtPace, San Antonio, Texas; VIKTOR MISIANO, independent curator,
Moscow; AKIKO MIYAKE, Program Director for CCA Kitakyushu, Japan; STEPHANIE
MOISDON TREMBLAY, art critic and freelance curator, Professor at the Universite
Paris I - St. Charles, la Sorbonne; ASA NACKING, associate curator at the
Louisiana Museum, Denmark; MICHELLE NICOL, curator, art and film historian,
Zurich; HANS-ULRICH OBRIST, independent curator, Paris, Vienna and London,
operator of the Migrateurs program at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris;
PEDRO REYES, artist and critic, curator at the Museo de Arte Carillo Gil,
Mexico City; KATHRIN RHOMBERG, curator of the Vienna Secession, co-curator
of Manifesta III; JOSE ROCA, curator and critic, Visual Arts Department at
the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogotá; NANCY SPECTOR, Curator of Contemporary
Art at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; JON-OVE STEIHAUG, independent curator
and critic, Oslo; BARBARA VANDERLINDEN, founder and director of Roomade, Brussels;
HORTENSIA VOELCKERS, Director of the Wiener Festwochen, Vienna; OCTAVIO ZAYA,
independent curator and writer, New York.
Presented by the X Art Foundation
and VOTI
---
The Union of the Imaginary (VOTI)
an online public forum presented by the X Art Foundation and VOTI
An internation association of Situationists can be seen as a union of workers in an advanced sector of culture, or more precisely as a union of all those who claim the right to a task now impeded by social conditions; hence as an attempt at an organization of professional revolutionaries in culture. -Guy Debord
With the courage of the unacademic and the radical, according to the necessities of contemporary art. - Willem Sandberg
The Union of the Imaginary (VOTI) is a permanent forum for the discussion of issues pertaining to curatorial practice in the context of contemporary society. Its goals are to promote discussion and collaboration among curators; to develop a progressive understanding of the role of curatorial practice; and to fight homogenization and instrumentalization at every level of culture. VOTI encourages an open discussion of issues that concern the present and future of curatorial activity, particularly in its relation to intellectual production and the politics of everyday life. VOTI is a laboratory for visionary experimentation, a think tank for the testing of ideas both concrete and utopical.
The Union of the Imaginary is dedicated to the memory of Alexander Dorner (1893-1957).
A Brief History of the Union of the Imaginary
1. November 1997: Bonn. 33 curators from many countries -- among them Barbara Vanderlinden, Yuko Hasegawa, Dan Cameron, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Viktor Misiano and Carlos Basualdo -- take part in a Conclave organized by the Bonn-based Foundation for Art and Culture. The Conclave is asked to recommend a certain number of artists for a show at the Kunstmuseum in 1999. Several participants express their disagreement with a procedure that overvalues names and reifies art practice instead of encouraging a more dynamic and fluid curatorial approach.
2. January 1998: New York. Francesco Bonami, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carlos Basualdo, Dan Cameron, Hou Hanru, Okwui Enwezor, Matthew Higgs, Rosa Martínez, Susan Kandel and Asa Nacking are invited to present ten artists each in the context of a book project organized by Phaidon Press. As a response to what they perceive as a growing homogenizing tendency imposed on curatorial activity, Bonami, Obrist and Basualdo decide in a meeting in New York to organize a forum for contestation and resistance.
3. February 1998: Madrid. During the lectures organized at ARCO in Madrid several meetings take place between Okwui Enwezor, Dan Cameron, Hou Hanru, Francesco Bonami, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Carlos Basualdo about the possibily of establishing an organization to fight the homogeneization of curatorial practice and to promote a further understanding of the role of the curator in contemporary society.
4. March 31, 1998: New York. Hans Ulrich Obrist and Carlos Basualdo founded the Union of the Imaginary (VOTI) in a meeting with Jordan Crandall, director of the X Art Foundation. It is decided that the X Art Foundation will host a permanent forum for the Union. Crandall becomes the official Delegado for the Union.