Talk between Charles Esche and Manuel Borja-Villel
21 Aralık 2013
The following talk took place in 2012 between Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven and Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Reina Sofia Madrid. The text is copied from the Van Abbemuseum website. Several links were added, and some sections highlighted.
Charles Esche: What museum histories or traditions do you draw on when thinking about the development of Museo Reina Sofia at the moment?
Manuel Borja-Villal: The first thing that comes to mind is the artist’s museums like Marcel Broodthaers Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles or different types of museums that artists have imagined, especially those that aim to defetishize objects. At the same time one can think of other types of museums and artistic practices that were developed in countries with no orthodox tradition of modernity, like Latin America for example. The Mirco Museum of Gustavo Guntix –a museum where the artist-director is actually a bus driver-– is fascinating for me. It is a museum without a permanent place, where there is a popular appeal whilst also being very eclectic - in the good sense of the word. There are other more radical practices, like that of Lygia Clark who wanted to redefine the relationship between art and society. She proposed a museum where you don’t collect things, but create experiences that lead to communities of affection, even communities of love. For me these are models that are interesting to look at in order to develop new forms of institutionalism.There are two other models I would add; there is of course the familiar museum of modern art. Its validity is certainly questionable today, but it is after all our roots. It is one thing to criticize modernity, but that does not mean we want to go back to medieval times. In that sense we still need to recognize that enlightenment and modernity happened.I would also look to new forms of institutionalism, like the indignados or occupy movement because right now they are they are the voice of the masses, in the sense of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. There are also people who are looking at ideas around the commons and copyleft that allow us to think the institutions anew, to construct institutions that are more in flux and participative.
Charles Esche: I agree that the current changes in socialization that we are seeing through the indignados/occupy movement are very important for us think about; the fact that is a participative, radical democracy that tries to value hospitality above all is crucial for the future. The fact that a newcomer is welcomed and you can immediately join the debate is incredibly important. My question is how can we create a museum that offers that kind of hospitality, that invites people to come in and immediately gives them a voice. The way the indignados/occupy movement is trying to work - repeating the words back, using sign language to not shout people down, are institutional rules that immediately construct a hospitable, constructive environment. In the museum we still erect high barriers of knowledge, expertise, class and taste – people too often come to us seeking confirmation of their prejudices rather than dialogue with the other. We have a lot of work to do here. But I also think there are some historical models that are quite useful. For me, one of the most inspiring museums is the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London - which houses the personal collection and belongings of the 18th century English architect. He created an architectural environment packed full with objects, which became a strange combination of living space and early installation. Essentially the works are doubly significant, both from their independent character and what they contribute to the whole. What you see is an ordered abundance that both overwhelms and makes sense - almost like the Internet! Everything is available, but you have to find methods of searching through it, you have to physically ‘google’ the collection. I feel we have lost so much through the professionalization of the curatorial system that paradoxically controls artworks under the rubric of giving them autonomy from a context. As curators, we are always careful to show specific things in specific conditions, like in huge white spaces. Soane’s model was very different, and you can also trace it today in anatomy museums or older science museum displays where as much as possible is made available and you have to make your own choices as a viewer. I suspect this is much closer to people’s everyday experiences and the museum has to adapt. The other historic museum model for me is what Alexander Dorner tried to do in Hannover in the late 1920s. He took the universal museum going from Pre-history to the “Raum der Gegenwart” (“room of the present”) designed by Moholy-Nagy to try and tell a complete story of art and its relation to history. The ambition to tell the story of society through its visual culture is something lost in the divisions between old, modern and contemporary art museums. We need to restore art’s connection to broad developments in our displays and Dorner’s attempt is something we have come closer to since the Nazis threw him out. Indeed, given current politics in the Netherlands I sometimes feel a little like Alexander Dorner, because politics is reverting to spreading fear and impossibility as it did back then. I have to say it gives me strength to see how important his practice remains today, even though it was so hated by the political community of his own time.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I agree with what you say and I would like to add two ideas. One of course is Aby Warburg and his atlas project; a great exhibition .The idea of the Warburg atlas is a model for all of us, because normally you standardize atlases. But Warburg put everything together - bottles, televisions etc. His was an atlas of difference, of things that apparently do not relate and in a sense that is what we are trying to do in our museum. The orthodox idea of a museum or an academy tries to undo difference and comparison by making things rigid or fixed. So for me Warburg’s idea is vital. He was neither an artist in a traditional sense, nor a curator or an art historian but everything at the same time. Today I find the more interesting people involved with artistic practice are the ones in between, moving between being an artist, a writer, an art historian and other disciplines. Maybe the traditional idea of what an artist, an art historian or a curator does is changing. And here Warburg becomes a crucial model for how museums should adapt. A discussion I have often here in the museum is with people that come to the Reina Sofia and complain that they get lost all the time. I guess I should try to make it easier, so I talk to people and they advise me to group displays – to put all the collection together, all the temporary exhibitions together, then divide the collection in decades etc. So in a way there is a polarity between certain tendencies towards ‘consecutivism’ - meaning that one thing leads you to another on the basis of causality and another option which has to do with being adrift, which in a way is the flaneur - somebody who keeps discovering things. I think the example of Warburg would bring us to the idea of a museum as a place to be adrift, not one where things are fixed in place and secured forever. I also agree with you that unfortunately our period has similarities with the 1930s. Clearly we are entering a period of populism - just look at the leaders of the major countries. It is a period where politics itself has disappeared and where the market (even if it is negative) is everywhere, a period where we in art are perceived as elitist, as something irrelevant and we are clearly heading towards an instrumental view of culture. Now, we can recognize this from history - so we should probably act accordingly. We need to reconsider some fundamental ideas that we thought were somehow natural or set in stone. Take the collection for example, should we continue to hang on to the works and the objects and gather even more of them, even if we hide them in storage? If we follow this logic then we are trapped in the hands of the populists, because it is not sustainable. Maybe it is a matter of shifting focus and realizing that what makes us strong it is not how many works we have, but how many stories we can share. I think this is a big change.
Charles Esche: That reminds me of a recent traditionalist attack on the museum that really took me by surprise. I once said in an newspaper interview that we should understand that the museum may not exist fifty years from now. This seemed to me a sensible remark with no special significance beyond the fact that museums are products of a certain time and culture that may be radically changing. It’s reason for existing has to be embedded to a part of a changing society and it is always possible that it might lose its connection, especially if it doesn’t react to the outside world. Now this statement provoked a huge reaction from conservatives who said I wanted to destroy the museum by questioning its existence. I realised that certain mild thoughts are now beyond contemplation for some people who simply cannot imagine a future anymore and want everything to be kept as close as possible to its current state. I found that quite frightening, that people interested in art could be so closed and distant from one another that even thoughts are dangerous.
Manuel Borja-Villal: It seems to be a mix up of the idea of property and some kind of messianic idea that your own history is set in stone. Things usually do not happen like that. And also it is a kind of blindness towards reality…
Charles Esche: …and especially blindness to what is going on now. We were talking about the indignados movement - how does a movement like that match with the idea of a museum?
Manuel Borja-Villal: As we are seeing, many things will not last, they are fragile - even the materials of contemporary art will not last. What will remain is the stories that we build around those ideas and how we make them alive. For me, this is the role of a very active archive. In this respect, the archive that Suely Rolnik has constructed around the work of Lygia Clark is very interesting. It is neither research on her work ‘therapy’, nor is it about just buying objects. What she did is construct an archive of testimonies and dialogues between people, basically collecting stories. That has no market value, at least not yet. It puts you (the museum) on a different level. Moving from text to hypertext is what museums should be able to do. That means a type of structure that is in flux, a relational structure. And that means changing our relationship with the public and with each other: getting together and keeping things in permanent exchange. After all we do not live outside the market – but we are fighting it, fighting with financial power. Art has always been extremely ambiguous in its relation to the market. Since the 1970s, we can say that some of the most successful works were the most critical of the institution. Yet the more we research, the more we produce exhibitions, the more actively we inflate the market. The case of Lygia Clark is a good example. In the early 1990s very few people were interested in her work, especially what happened after 1964. Then museums started researching it as some of us believed that this was an important, radical practice. Now there will be an exhibition of her work at MoMA New York and I’m sure people will see a chance to inflate prices and works with previously no market-value, such as her work ‘therapy’, suddenly have value. So, we built up the significance of an artist and now can’t have access to the works anymore. I did a Lygia Clark exhibition in the 1990s that would probably be impossible now. I would simply not be able to afford it. So we build our own traps.
Charles Esche: What do we do about it?
Manuel Borja-Villal: What Duchamp realized after he did the ready-mades in 1914, is that after a while they became fetishes. Then he made the boites en valise where he fetishized himself. And how do you fetishize something? One way is to turn from being an artist to a collector. That way you create a distance and therefore negate any possible fetishism. So, he makes small versions of the ready-mades and they become collectibles in a way, serial works. I don’t think, this is the unique formula, but it is an example. Another way is to do what Suely Rolnik did with Lygia Clark.
Charles Esche: The question of how, why and when to copy, as well as to challenge free market copyright and intellectual property rights, is another crucial response I think. Copying challenges the market because the market needs the idea of the original to bestow value. The rules of intellectual property diminish forms of creativity by making ideas illegal. Walter Benjamin understood this 80 years ago, but his ideas have never really been taken seriously in the museum world. If we could challenge the idea of the original and establish the value of storytelling by constantly rewriting histories from the point of view of the present we would have a new set of opportunities. We could for example copy each other’s collections and show them in two places with very different narrative contexts. Even if we recognised the unique quality of the original, the copy would still give you 90% of the possibilities of the original. We can then rethink the distribution and transmission of the work. The museum is built to house the original as a special cocooned environment where objects can survive outside the pressures of daily life. Once you allow the objects a copy-life, even one that is secondary, both the work and the cocoon can change. Worshipping the originals becomes one option amongst others, not the prime purpose anymore. Here, the idea of the archive and storytelling is very important, as you say. But we can also release new propositions about objects in the collection. The Superflex project, called Free Sol LeWitt at the Van Abbemuseum, was an idea of literally freeing the potential of this conceptual artwork by copying it and giving it away. It let the work loose into the world. I think there is so much potential in our collections if we activate them. We have a huge resource that we should use to better financial effect without selling out to the market.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I think the modern world – and capitalism itself - is based on an inherent contradiction. At its core it is about obtaining as much value as possible but in order to obtain value you have to give something away - even if you don’t want to – to the one that works, to investment or to maintaining status. In this moment lies a crisis that has reoccurred since the 18th century. On the one hand enlightenment is about knowledge, global education, making us wiser, freeing us. On the other hand capitalism is about scarcity. The less there is of something the more it is valued. Once knowledge becomes a commodity it has a value as thus capitalism wants to keep knowledge limited but it also needs people to have knowledge to develop itself. So in a way capitalism creates both enlightenment and obscurantism. We are part of that. We educate people, we want to give things away, but we also keep things hidden. It is clear that the big museums like MoMA or Metropolitan, only have 10% of their wealth visible - the rest is an obscure matter. We should create a society with access - and here I am referring to Georges Bataille - we should inflate society with things of value. Thinking this through, you could convince the artist to do 10,000 Sol LeWitts and give them away to everybody. Of course, to the trustees it could appear that you are giving away your wealth and therefore your trustees might cut your head off! However we should convince our institutions that the logic of scarcity, the logic of capitalism does not have to be the only legitimate logic. There is another logic, the logic of access that already exists in different societies. So, by giving away your Sol LeWitts, you might have less works, but you might get richer in terms of the stories, the experiences you get from all the other people. After all, this must be our first mission: to create this community of affection that connects to art at an emotional level. If somehow we could twist our institutions in that direction, I think we could make a difference. However the difficulties are huge because it is not us but the trustees, the politicians, the financiers, the collectors that control our institutions. All of them are interested in scarcity either for nationalistic reasons, because the collection is the treasure of the country, or for simple financial reasons in not wanting to lose the value of their possessions. Changing this would be a radical break. But maybe we can just start by bringing several institutions together that are dealing with these questions. To achieve anything we have to work together.
Charles Esche: I completely agree. Also, we need to defend the cultural value of the museum as oppose to its economical or political value. What Bataille says at one point is, “the problem is limited to how the excess is to be squandered”. And in a sense capitalism produced the enlightenment as excess and not from within it’s own logic. Capitalism is a means not an end in this sense and that seems to be the thing we have lost today. Any form of economic value is simply there to give us the means to do what we want. The danger we face is that everything is squeezed through the lens of economy and there is no room for other value systems. So where before you ideally would want to see a balance between political, cultural and economic value, what we have now is only the law of economy which controls politics and culture. Politicians compete to run the economy best, not to govern society or offer cultural values through their behaviour or policies. The same happens with museums. The questions we face are how can the museum make more money, how can it bring more visitors, how can it produce more excess. So everything in contemporary society becomes dedicated to producing an excess that we don’t know what to do with. This is the big theme of the crisis. All the excess was invested in shares, cars, houses, more loans, more risk and in the end it was transformed into ever greater debt and things we don’t need. Culture is there to balance the excess, to leave something behind, just as politics is there to balance out power and produce a functioning society. The West forgot this since 1989.
Museums have a real role to play here. We need to challenge the idea that we are only a local tourist attraction, something to produce gentrification, city marketing or money at the door. This is the danger given the populist demands of our governments and their poverty of political/cultural ambition. We also need to avoid only being an opportunity for collectors to increase the value of their collection. Education, research, ‘imagining the world otherwise’ need to be part of our raison d’être and I do think we have a chance if we find ways to explain our position simply and clearly…
Manuel Borja-Villal: I agree with you. I see art especially from the 60’s become progressively more critical and more radical. For instance, Mario Merz made a work calling for the general strike in 1970; or you had Pasolini doing his film ‘La Rabbia’ and Antonio Negri was imprisoned. That I call radical. However it is curious that this period has since become historicised as radical without much following it up. It is clear that in the 1940’s and 1950’s it was academia that was creating the canon. Artists could ask for no more than Greenberg reviewing one of their shows, that assured success. Now the successors of Greenberg, or the dominant, hegemonic academic group is the October group and their followers. This group despises artists such as Schnabel, Barceló, Damien Hirst; but their opinion is actually barely relevant - because they have no power at all. Power is governed by which collection you are in, how many times you are successfuly auctioned, how the market values your work. It is ironic that art wanted to make a change in society for 100 years but that at the moment that art is much more part of society through theatricality, art as politics or information, the position of art becomes powerless, becomes more it is immersed inside the capitalist system that dominates social exchange. Some artistic strategies are no different to the strategies of any business man or entrepreneur and the result is that our recent museum history is not much different then the history of the system. We have a system based on real estate, buildings and debt. Almost every museum has, as a consequence, had an extension or new building by a ‘special’ star somebody or other architect (laughing). yet while we get bigger, the crisis gets more and more extreme and even a franchise systems like the Guggenheim is failing economically, at least in the long run. Certainly, the idea of a global franchise is failing artistically while there is clearly a need to have a politics that serves people, ecology and democracy rather than just the economy, Our museums need to think how to reflect this change. You are a museum director, I am a museum director, yet more and more museum directors are becoming managers. I have the feeling that if you, as a director, make an exhibition, write, or think about changes that people judge you to be abandoning the management of the institution, which is so strange for me to hear. I am convinced we should go back to these core issues. Art should be about doubts, relationships, questions - about opening up spaces, people and knowledge. To achieve that we need to think and act mor together, as a kind of global museum, not in the sense of Malraux, but in the sense that we are one already. What is happening to you is happening to me. Your Lissitzky is my Lissitzky.
Charles Esche: I think that is very important. If we can start by understanding the different individual collections as something connected and global we can offer a different model than expansion or franchising. That is what our L’internationale project is about, which you are joining. We are trying to create the formats where this can happen. You are also exploring the idea of a creative commons licenses for the purchase of artworks that we would like to adopt. Once we act together we can each in different areas and combine our knowledge for public use. This is the way we need to go..
Manuel Borja-Villal: I think we should imagine ourselves as a collective body, where we do separate things but everything is connected and – like human body - you make use of your different capacities, your research, your production etc to produce a whole. That could be a real future strength…
Charles Esche: In technology, the shared model is more commonly used. We can learn from their idea open source, as well as of sharing the investment and rights in research and then construct different local versions based on shared fundamental knowledge. The scale and finances into these issues should be much bigger than they currently are if we can realise this potential.
Manuel Borja-Villal: You can see the prices of artworks are going up and the economy is going down. This parallels politicians, institutions as society in general becoming extremely conservative. On the other hand the hope is that the difference between the 1970’s crisis and today will be the technology. What makes the indignados movement so successful is that they can mobilise very quickly and inform each other immediately. We have a communication potential that would have been utopian in the 1960’s. Where Marcel Broodthaers’ museum was an artistic parallel to real museums, now it could be in the real world, because technology has changed the situation.
Charles Esche: The important thing about technology is what we do with it. The interesting thing about the occupy movement in New York, Madrid, London even Amsterdam is that they set society a question. There is, as yet, no answer nor an ideology, but a simple set of questions about why and how and for whom?. If you lay those questions out then people can gather and feel what it is like to think together. We recently had a problem with local politics and instead of writing to individuals, I just put a question on facebook and I got so many more reactions, also from people that I personally don’t know but had visited the museum. They sent letters directly to the local newspaper and the councillors that they appreciate our work and want to take part in supporting the museum. I was a little overwhelmed in fact. It seems if you have a real question you can use technology to help you find an answer.
Manuel Borja-Villal: That brings me to another idea. There is a writer from Peru who wrote a book about “underground rivers” near the Amazon. I find it an interesting metaphor. These underground rivers could be how we see our interconnectedness. You and I could share something in a place that could be connected via an underground river with Chile for example. So, while both our situations are complex with countries becoming nationalist and inwardly focused, something we do could have repercussions in Chile via technology and also the other way round. This way we could survive via the underground rivers where things disappear and pop up somewhere else in a different context. This allows us to be flexible and stronger in a way. If we build underground rivers, they will be very difficult to stop.
Charles Esche: This relates also to our proposal for a dispersed museum. The idea is to think beyond the building and imagine ourselves as a kind of agency or principle that can be enacted almost anywhere. The challenge to achieve this is to keep the funding and political basis that is geographically located but still, we have to escape the logic of only answering people with money in the affirmative. Your metaphor of underground rivers is useful here, along with the visible river being almost like an alibi. My question is how can we secure our core and still disperse into the world, whether that is to a local neighbourhood or to Palestine or Chile.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I think we are approaching very different form from the humanistic, enlightened sense of politics. This is new and we are building something for which we actually have no models so it is not easy to provide instant answers.
Charles Esche: Yet with Picasso’s Guernica you seem to also have a ‘Trojan horse’ in the museum that gives you the possibility to work actively with a double strategy. The icon in the house guarantees you visitors of all sorts, at the same time you can set up all kind of underground rivers without endangering your relationship to politicians or trustees, since you present a national icon that has to be seen. But are there alternatives to this smart strategy? What does it mean to a museum like the Van Abbemuseum that does not have a “national” treasure? The best thing for us would be to present René Daniëls as our icon, because we have an huge collection, but it is still too early. I am conscious that Klimt only became an Austrian icon in the 1990s. So. We have a long time to wait. We have Lissitzky of course, but that makes less sense in Eindhoven than in Moscow or Vitebsk. I see this as a problem for us.
Manuel Borja-Villal: Your collection is very contemporary because it became really important only in the 1960s and 1970s, which was a very open moment in history. Therefore you have a progressive collection that does not have this umbrella or shield of an icon that allows you to do other things without provoking discussion about visitor figures. In Madrid, we have 2.5 million visitors. Not all of them come for the Guernica of course, but combined with a collection that makes lots of sense in Madrid, in which works by Miró, Dalí etc. also tell the story of the republic and of Franco. In that sense our history runs through our collection. This gives you the freedom to do other things and of course Madrid is a cultural tourist destination, at least they don’t come here for the beach. Eindhoven can never reproduce that but if we build this real international network we can look to share works more easily.
Charles Esche: (laughing)…we could make a copy of Guernica.
Manuel Borja-Villal: As international museums, we should start helping each other in a more sustainable way.
Charles Esche: Chris Dercon recently said that he saw great problems for medium sized museums in northern Europe. He sees institutions that are small, research orientated, fast and relatively inexpensive to run, and museums like the Reina Sofia or the Tate as sustainable but the medium scale will get caught in-between. That is something we - as one of the medium sized museums - have to think very hard about and decide in which direction we want to go – scale up or scale down.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I think really working together can produce something. Just like the airlines…
Charles Esche: …the Sky-team.
Manuel Borja-Villal: Not many medium-sized museums can become big enough and it will be difficult to find a form so the only way to do that is to work in collaboration internationally. Of course it will be very difficult to change the predominance of Tate or MoMa as they are self-sufficient. But they have a problem.. For example, recently they tried to re-hang the Abstract Impressionist rooms to modify the canonical story, but when you have 10 Barney Newmans, 10 Franz Klines, uncountable Jackson Pollocks and so on you are just too rich (laughing)… it is not so easy to write history from a different point of view. It becomes more a matter of real estate and even if I know that they are trying very hard, it is structurally impossible. In that sense, they will not be the museums of the future.
Charles Esche: We are trying in Eindhoven to write history on our own terms in a way, partly through thinking about re-enactments and reproductions. After all, the reason the big museum have the canonical works is because they have written the canon and in a sense they can’t escape that now. Yet it is also clear that the history of art we know needs to change. The trajectories of modernity that we have do not fit the current moment where we are no longer postmodern. What I find exciting today is that I feel that I am in a pre-period for the first time. All my life I have been in post-periods – post-war, post-socialism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, but now we have finally arrived in pre- to something that does not yet have a name.
Manuel Borja-Villal: Yes, I think we are in between, there is something happening, but we don’ know yet what it is. You feel like you are in the 14th century…
Charles Esche: In such a moment, it is really important to write history differently, to finish off the posts, as it were…but something else before we finish. Can I ask how do you share you thoughts about these matters with politicians? How do you persuade them of the cultural values that we share?**
Manuel Borja-Villal: That is very difficult. Because we have several level of politics. On the one hand we have some the surviving 19th century construction of the nation state. A model we know cannot hold anymore. But curiously enough, the more the world goes global the more we get into very rigid categories. Another element is populism, which comes in many extremes and from all political positions. Last but not least there is the remaining social democratic element, but with an aversion to anything that comes from outside that is immediately accused to be anti-system. That is another problem. **In this situation, we have first to convince the politicians that culture is a public service. Second for this service to be effective it cannot be instrumentalized, it has to be free. This is the radical element that has art in relation to other disciplines, it cannot be instrumentalized, otherwise it is not art anymore and it will stop. Third, especially in countries and places that are peripheral, that this is the moment for us to tell a different story. There is this tsunami coming from Asia and sometimes I have the feeling they are taking over the worst from us but we cannot follow the populist way that rejects the outside. But of course, if you talk to your trustees they listen with interest and ask why don’t you do a Schnabel exhibition or yet another Picasso exhibition…
Charles Esche: One thing that I see in this unbalanced triangle of economics, politics and culture is that the political has so failed to internationalize itself, while the economical side and the cultural side have clearly internationalized. I think we really have to ask why that is so, what are the systemic problems. We can expect nationalism of the nationalist parties, but of the neo-liberals or the social democrats you should be able to expect some kind of international vision. Traditionally neo-liberalism was not in alliance with nationalism, but that what we have now in the Netherlands very clearly. You see that politics is inadequate to the issues we were talking about, while we absolutely need a good politics to defend culture and enquiry. Alain Badiou wrote recently about the idea that there is only one world. This contradicts the “making worlds’ of the last Venice Biennial but I think it is a crucial point. We have to negotiate about this ‘one world’ and act within it. That is also where our thoughts on collaboration have to be grounded.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I agree there is no outside…probably the way to deal with this moment of crisis is to see cultural institutions like museums as places for real democracy, especially since we have this connection to memory and thinking about the future.
Charles Esche: If the museums recognise that there is only one world and, in a sense, only one public, then we can strengthen each other enormously. Politics would have to understand that the border of Eindhoven does not determine the understanding of the citizen. In a way we could say that the generation of René Daniëls was part of the last generation that really was from Eindhoven, or any particular place. The generation now might live in Eindhoven but they are looking at everything, everywhere - the access to information is completely different. René had his stroke in 1987, which was just before the world changed. The “Eindhoven niet Eindhoven” painting somehow captures this. Now the connections and underground rivers run fast. Yet I am also struck by how contemporary his work can be today. He is at a turning point in many ways.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I think a new world is opening but I don’t want to build a myth around it. We should just take that chance.
Charles Esche: Thank you for this inspiring talk.
Charles Esche: What museum histories or traditions do you draw on when thinking about the development of Museo Reina Sofia at the moment?
Manuel Borja-Villal: The first thing that comes to mind is the artist’s museums like Marcel Broodthaers Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles or different types of museums that artists have imagined, especially those that aim to defetishize objects. At the same time one can think of other types of museums and artistic practices that were developed in countries with no orthodox tradition of modernity, like Latin America for example. The Mirco Museum of Gustavo Guntix –a museum where the artist-director is actually a bus driver-– is fascinating for me. It is a museum without a permanent place, where there is a popular appeal whilst also being very eclectic - in the good sense of the word. There are other more radical practices, like that of Lygia Clark who wanted to redefine the relationship between art and society. She proposed a museum where you don’t collect things, but create experiences that lead to communities of affection, even communities of love. For me these are models that are interesting to look at in order to develop new forms of institutionalism.There are two other models I would add; there is of course the familiar museum of modern art. Its validity is certainly questionable today, but it is after all our roots. It is one thing to criticize modernity, but that does not mean we want to go back to medieval times. In that sense we still need to recognize that enlightenment and modernity happened.I would also look to new forms of institutionalism, like the indignados or occupy movement because right now they are they are the voice of the masses, in the sense of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. There are also people who are looking at ideas around the commons and copyleft that allow us to think the institutions anew, to construct institutions that are more in flux and participative.
Charles Esche: I agree that the current changes in socialization that we are seeing through the indignados/occupy movement are very important for us think about; the fact that is a participative, radical democracy that tries to value hospitality above all is crucial for the future. The fact that a newcomer is welcomed and you can immediately join the debate is incredibly important. My question is how can we create a museum that offers that kind of hospitality, that invites people to come in and immediately gives them a voice. The way the indignados/occupy movement is trying to work - repeating the words back, using sign language to not shout people down, are institutional rules that immediately construct a hospitable, constructive environment. In the museum we still erect high barriers of knowledge, expertise, class and taste – people too often come to us seeking confirmation of their prejudices rather than dialogue with the other. We have a lot of work to do here. But I also think there are some historical models that are quite useful. For me, one of the most inspiring museums is the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London - which houses the personal collection and belongings of the 18th century English architect. He created an architectural environment packed full with objects, which became a strange combination of living space and early installation. Essentially the works are doubly significant, both from their independent character and what they contribute to the whole. What you see is an ordered abundance that both overwhelms and makes sense - almost like the Internet! Everything is available, but you have to find methods of searching through it, you have to physically ‘google’ the collection. I feel we have lost so much through the professionalization of the curatorial system that paradoxically controls artworks under the rubric of giving them autonomy from a context. As curators, we are always careful to show specific things in specific conditions, like in huge white spaces. Soane’s model was very different, and you can also trace it today in anatomy museums or older science museum displays where as much as possible is made available and you have to make your own choices as a viewer. I suspect this is much closer to people’s everyday experiences and the museum has to adapt. The other historic museum model for me is what Alexander Dorner tried to do in Hannover in the late 1920s. He took the universal museum going from Pre-history to the “Raum der Gegenwart” (“room of the present”) designed by Moholy-Nagy to try and tell a complete story of art and its relation to history. The ambition to tell the story of society through its visual culture is something lost in the divisions between old, modern and contemporary art museums. We need to restore art’s connection to broad developments in our displays and Dorner’s attempt is something we have come closer to since the Nazis threw him out. Indeed, given current politics in the Netherlands I sometimes feel a little like Alexander Dorner, because politics is reverting to spreading fear and impossibility as it did back then. I have to say it gives me strength to see how important his practice remains today, even though it was so hated by the political community of his own time.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I agree with what you say and I would like to add two ideas. One of course is Aby Warburg and his atlas project; a great exhibition .The idea of the Warburg atlas is a model for all of us, because normally you standardize atlases. But Warburg put everything together - bottles, televisions etc. His was an atlas of difference, of things that apparently do not relate and in a sense that is what we are trying to do in our museum. The orthodox idea of a museum or an academy tries to undo difference and comparison by making things rigid or fixed. So for me Warburg’s idea is vital. He was neither an artist in a traditional sense, nor a curator or an art historian but everything at the same time. Today I find the more interesting people involved with artistic practice are the ones in between, moving between being an artist, a writer, an art historian and other disciplines. Maybe the traditional idea of what an artist, an art historian or a curator does is changing. And here Warburg becomes a crucial model for how museums should adapt. A discussion I have often here in the museum is with people that come to the Reina Sofia and complain that they get lost all the time. I guess I should try to make it easier, so I talk to people and they advise me to group displays – to put all the collection together, all the temporary exhibitions together, then divide the collection in decades etc. So in a way there is a polarity between certain tendencies towards ‘consecutivism’ - meaning that one thing leads you to another on the basis of causality and another option which has to do with being adrift, which in a way is the flaneur - somebody who keeps discovering things. I think the example of Warburg would bring us to the idea of a museum as a place to be adrift, not one where things are fixed in place and secured forever. I also agree with you that unfortunately our period has similarities with the 1930s. Clearly we are entering a period of populism - just look at the leaders of the major countries. It is a period where politics itself has disappeared and where the market (even if it is negative) is everywhere, a period where we in art are perceived as elitist, as something irrelevant and we are clearly heading towards an instrumental view of culture. Now, we can recognize this from history - so we should probably act accordingly. We need to reconsider some fundamental ideas that we thought were somehow natural or set in stone. Take the collection for example, should we continue to hang on to the works and the objects and gather even more of them, even if we hide them in storage? If we follow this logic then we are trapped in the hands of the populists, because it is not sustainable. Maybe it is a matter of shifting focus and realizing that what makes us strong it is not how many works we have, but how many stories we can share. I think this is a big change.
Charles Esche: That reminds me of a recent traditionalist attack on the museum that really took me by surprise. I once said in an newspaper interview that we should understand that the museum may not exist fifty years from now. This seemed to me a sensible remark with no special significance beyond the fact that museums are products of a certain time and culture that may be radically changing. It’s reason for existing has to be embedded to a part of a changing society and it is always possible that it might lose its connection, especially if it doesn’t react to the outside world. Now this statement provoked a huge reaction from conservatives who said I wanted to destroy the museum by questioning its existence. I realised that certain mild thoughts are now beyond contemplation for some people who simply cannot imagine a future anymore and want everything to be kept as close as possible to its current state. I found that quite frightening, that people interested in art could be so closed and distant from one another that even thoughts are dangerous.
Manuel Borja-Villal: It seems to be a mix up of the idea of property and some kind of messianic idea that your own history is set in stone. Things usually do not happen like that. And also it is a kind of blindness towards reality…
Charles Esche: …and especially blindness to what is going on now. We were talking about the indignados movement - how does a movement like that match with the idea of a museum?
Manuel Borja-Villal: As we are seeing, many things will not last, they are fragile - even the materials of contemporary art will not last. What will remain is the stories that we build around those ideas and how we make them alive. For me, this is the role of a very active archive. In this respect, the archive that Suely Rolnik has constructed around the work of Lygia Clark is very interesting. It is neither research on her work ‘therapy’, nor is it about just buying objects. What she did is construct an archive of testimonies and dialogues between people, basically collecting stories. That has no market value, at least not yet. It puts you (the museum) on a different level. Moving from text to hypertext is what museums should be able to do. That means a type of structure that is in flux, a relational structure. And that means changing our relationship with the public and with each other: getting together and keeping things in permanent exchange. After all we do not live outside the market – but we are fighting it, fighting with financial power. Art has always been extremely ambiguous in its relation to the market. Since the 1970s, we can say that some of the most successful works were the most critical of the institution. Yet the more we research, the more we produce exhibitions, the more actively we inflate the market. The case of Lygia Clark is a good example. In the early 1990s very few people were interested in her work, especially what happened after 1964. Then museums started researching it as some of us believed that this was an important, radical practice. Now there will be an exhibition of her work at MoMA New York and I’m sure people will see a chance to inflate prices and works with previously no market-value, such as her work ‘therapy’, suddenly have value. So, we built up the significance of an artist and now can’t have access to the works anymore. I did a Lygia Clark exhibition in the 1990s that would probably be impossible now. I would simply not be able to afford it. So we build our own traps.
Charles Esche: What do we do about it?
Manuel Borja-Villal: What Duchamp realized after he did the ready-mades in 1914, is that after a while they became fetishes. Then he made the boites en valise where he fetishized himself. And how do you fetishize something? One way is to turn from being an artist to a collector. That way you create a distance and therefore negate any possible fetishism. So, he makes small versions of the ready-mades and they become collectibles in a way, serial works. I don’t think, this is the unique formula, but it is an example. Another way is to do what Suely Rolnik did with Lygia Clark.
Charles Esche: The question of how, why and when to copy, as well as to challenge free market copyright and intellectual property rights, is another crucial response I think. Copying challenges the market because the market needs the idea of the original to bestow value. The rules of intellectual property diminish forms of creativity by making ideas illegal. Walter Benjamin understood this 80 years ago, but his ideas have never really been taken seriously in the museum world. If we could challenge the idea of the original and establish the value of storytelling by constantly rewriting histories from the point of view of the present we would have a new set of opportunities. We could for example copy each other’s collections and show them in two places with very different narrative contexts. Even if we recognised the unique quality of the original, the copy would still give you 90% of the possibilities of the original. We can then rethink the distribution and transmission of the work. The museum is built to house the original as a special cocooned environment where objects can survive outside the pressures of daily life. Once you allow the objects a copy-life, even one that is secondary, both the work and the cocoon can change. Worshipping the originals becomes one option amongst others, not the prime purpose anymore. Here, the idea of the archive and storytelling is very important, as you say. But we can also release new propositions about objects in the collection. The Superflex project, called Free Sol LeWitt at the Van Abbemuseum, was an idea of literally freeing the potential of this conceptual artwork by copying it and giving it away. It let the work loose into the world. I think there is so much potential in our collections if we activate them. We have a huge resource that we should use to better financial effect without selling out to the market.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I think the modern world – and capitalism itself - is based on an inherent contradiction. At its core it is about obtaining as much value as possible but in order to obtain value you have to give something away - even if you don’t want to – to the one that works, to investment or to maintaining status. In this moment lies a crisis that has reoccurred since the 18th century. On the one hand enlightenment is about knowledge, global education, making us wiser, freeing us. On the other hand capitalism is about scarcity. The less there is of something the more it is valued. Once knowledge becomes a commodity it has a value as thus capitalism wants to keep knowledge limited but it also needs people to have knowledge to develop itself. So in a way capitalism creates both enlightenment and obscurantism. We are part of that. We educate people, we want to give things away, but we also keep things hidden. It is clear that the big museums like MoMA or Metropolitan, only have 10% of their wealth visible - the rest is an obscure matter. We should create a society with access - and here I am referring to Georges Bataille - we should inflate society with things of value. Thinking this through, you could convince the artist to do 10,000 Sol LeWitts and give them away to everybody. Of course, to the trustees it could appear that you are giving away your wealth and therefore your trustees might cut your head off! However we should convince our institutions that the logic of scarcity, the logic of capitalism does not have to be the only legitimate logic. There is another logic, the logic of access that already exists in different societies. So, by giving away your Sol LeWitts, you might have less works, but you might get richer in terms of the stories, the experiences you get from all the other people. After all, this must be our first mission: to create this community of affection that connects to art at an emotional level. If somehow we could twist our institutions in that direction, I think we could make a difference. However the difficulties are huge because it is not us but the trustees, the politicians, the financiers, the collectors that control our institutions. All of them are interested in scarcity either for nationalistic reasons, because the collection is the treasure of the country, or for simple financial reasons in not wanting to lose the value of their possessions. Changing this would be a radical break. But maybe we can just start by bringing several institutions together that are dealing with these questions. To achieve anything we have to work together.
Charles Esche: I completely agree. Also, we need to defend the cultural value of the museum as oppose to its economical or political value. What Bataille says at one point is, “the problem is limited to how the excess is to be squandered”. And in a sense capitalism produced the enlightenment as excess and not from within it’s own logic. Capitalism is a means not an end in this sense and that seems to be the thing we have lost today. Any form of economic value is simply there to give us the means to do what we want. The danger we face is that everything is squeezed through the lens of economy and there is no room for other value systems. So where before you ideally would want to see a balance between political, cultural and economic value, what we have now is only the law of economy which controls politics and culture. Politicians compete to run the economy best, not to govern society or offer cultural values through their behaviour or policies. The same happens with museums. The questions we face are how can the museum make more money, how can it bring more visitors, how can it produce more excess. So everything in contemporary society becomes dedicated to producing an excess that we don’t know what to do with. This is the big theme of the crisis. All the excess was invested in shares, cars, houses, more loans, more risk and in the end it was transformed into ever greater debt and things we don’t need. Culture is there to balance the excess, to leave something behind, just as politics is there to balance out power and produce a functioning society. The West forgot this since 1989.
Museums have a real role to play here. We need to challenge the idea that we are only a local tourist attraction, something to produce gentrification, city marketing or money at the door. This is the danger given the populist demands of our governments and their poverty of political/cultural ambition. We also need to avoid only being an opportunity for collectors to increase the value of their collection. Education, research, ‘imagining the world otherwise’ need to be part of our raison d’être and I do think we have a chance if we find ways to explain our position simply and clearly…
Manuel Borja-Villal: I agree with you. I see art especially from the 60’s become progressively more critical and more radical. For instance, Mario Merz made a work calling for the general strike in 1970; or you had Pasolini doing his film ‘La Rabbia’ and Antonio Negri was imprisoned. That I call radical. However it is curious that this period has since become historicised as radical without much following it up. It is clear that in the 1940’s and 1950’s it was academia that was creating the canon. Artists could ask for no more than Greenberg reviewing one of their shows, that assured success. Now the successors of Greenberg, or the dominant, hegemonic academic group is the October group and their followers. This group despises artists such as Schnabel, Barceló, Damien Hirst; but their opinion is actually barely relevant - because they have no power at all. Power is governed by which collection you are in, how many times you are successfuly auctioned, how the market values your work. It is ironic that art wanted to make a change in society for 100 years but that at the moment that art is much more part of society through theatricality, art as politics or information, the position of art becomes powerless, becomes more it is immersed inside the capitalist system that dominates social exchange. Some artistic strategies are no different to the strategies of any business man or entrepreneur and the result is that our recent museum history is not much different then the history of the system. We have a system based on real estate, buildings and debt. Almost every museum has, as a consequence, had an extension or new building by a ‘special’ star somebody or other architect (laughing). yet while we get bigger, the crisis gets more and more extreme and even a franchise systems like the Guggenheim is failing economically, at least in the long run. Certainly, the idea of a global franchise is failing artistically while there is clearly a need to have a politics that serves people, ecology and democracy rather than just the economy, Our museums need to think how to reflect this change. You are a museum director, I am a museum director, yet more and more museum directors are becoming managers. I have the feeling that if you, as a director, make an exhibition, write, or think about changes that people judge you to be abandoning the management of the institution, which is so strange for me to hear. I am convinced we should go back to these core issues. Art should be about doubts, relationships, questions - about opening up spaces, people and knowledge. To achieve that we need to think and act mor together, as a kind of global museum, not in the sense of Malraux, but in the sense that we are one already. What is happening to you is happening to me. Your Lissitzky is my Lissitzky.
Charles Esche: I think that is very important. If we can start by understanding the different individual collections as something connected and global we can offer a different model than expansion or franchising. That is what our L’internationale project is about, which you are joining. We are trying to create the formats where this can happen. You are also exploring the idea of a creative commons licenses for the purchase of artworks that we would like to adopt. Once we act together we can each in different areas and combine our knowledge for public use. This is the way we need to go..
Manuel Borja-Villal: I think we should imagine ourselves as a collective body, where we do separate things but everything is connected and – like human body - you make use of your different capacities, your research, your production etc to produce a whole. That could be a real future strength…
Charles Esche: In technology, the shared model is more commonly used. We can learn from their idea open source, as well as of sharing the investment and rights in research and then construct different local versions based on shared fundamental knowledge. The scale and finances into these issues should be much bigger than they currently are if we can realise this potential.
Manuel Borja-Villal: You can see the prices of artworks are going up and the economy is going down. This parallels politicians, institutions as society in general becoming extremely conservative. On the other hand the hope is that the difference between the 1970’s crisis and today will be the technology. What makes the indignados movement so successful is that they can mobilise very quickly and inform each other immediately. We have a communication potential that would have been utopian in the 1960’s. Where Marcel Broodthaers’ museum was an artistic parallel to real museums, now it could be in the real world, because technology has changed the situation.
Charles Esche: The important thing about technology is what we do with it. The interesting thing about the occupy movement in New York, Madrid, London even Amsterdam is that they set society a question. There is, as yet, no answer nor an ideology, but a simple set of questions about why and how and for whom?. If you lay those questions out then people can gather and feel what it is like to think together. We recently had a problem with local politics and instead of writing to individuals, I just put a question on facebook and I got so many more reactions, also from people that I personally don’t know but had visited the museum. They sent letters directly to the local newspaper and the councillors that they appreciate our work and want to take part in supporting the museum. I was a little overwhelmed in fact. It seems if you have a real question you can use technology to help you find an answer.
Manuel Borja-Villal: That brings me to another idea. There is a writer from Peru who wrote a book about “underground rivers” near the Amazon. I find it an interesting metaphor. These underground rivers could be how we see our interconnectedness. You and I could share something in a place that could be connected via an underground river with Chile for example. So, while both our situations are complex with countries becoming nationalist and inwardly focused, something we do could have repercussions in Chile via technology and also the other way round. This way we could survive via the underground rivers where things disappear and pop up somewhere else in a different context. This allows us to be flexible and stronger in a way. If we build underground rivers, they will be very difficult to stop.
Charles Esche: This relates also to our proposal for a dispersed museum. The idea is to think beyond the building and imagine ourselves as a kind of agency or principle that can be enacted almost anywhere. The challenge to achieve this is to keep the funding and political basis that is geographically located but still, we have to escape the logic of only answering people with money in the affirmative. Your metaphor of underground rivers is useful here, along with the visible river being almost like an alibi. My question is how can we secure our core and still disperse into the world, whether that is to a local neighbourhood or to Palestine or Chile.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I think we are approaching very different form from the humanistic, enlightened sense of politics. This is new and we are building something for which we actually have no models so it is not easy to provide instant answers.
Charles Esche: Yet with Picasso’s Guernica you seem to also have a ‘Trojan horse’ in the museum that gives you the possibility to work actively with a double strategy. The icon in the house guarantees you visitors of all sorts, at the same time you can set up all kind of underground rivers without endangering your relationship to politicians or trustees, since you present a national icon that has to be seen. But are there alternatives to this smart strategy? What does it mean to a museum like the Van Abbemuseum that does not have a “national” treasure? The best thing for us would be to present René Daniëls as our icon, because we have an huge collection, but it is still too early. I am conscious that Klimt only became an Austrian icon in the 1990s. So. We have a long time to wait. We have Lissitzky of course, but that makes less sense in Eindhoven than in Moscow or Vitebsk. I see this as a problem for us.
Manuel Borja-Villal: Your collection is very contemporary because it became really important only in the 1960s and 1970s, which was a very open moment in history. Therefore you have a progressive collection that does not have this umbrella or shield of an icon that allows you to do other things without provoking discussion about visitor figures. In Madrid, we have 2.5 million visitors. Not all of them come for the Guernica of course, but combined with a collection that makes lots of sense in Madrid, in which works by Miró, Dalí etc. also tell the story of the republic and of Franco. In that sense our history runs through our collection. This gives you the freedom to do other things and of course Madrid is a cultural tourist destination, at least they don’t come here for the beach. Eindhoven can never reproduce that but if we build this real international network we can look to share works more easily.
Charles Esche: (laughing)…we could make a copy of Guernica.
Manuel Borja-Villal: As international museums, we should start helping each other in a more sustainable way.
Charles Esche: Chris Dercon recently said that he saw great problems for medium sized museums in northern Europe. He sees institutions that are small, research orientated, fast and relatively inexpensive to run, and museums like the Reina Sofia or the Tate as sustainable but the medium scale will get caught in-between. That is something we - as one of the medium sized museums - have to think very hard about and decide in which direction we want to go – scale up or scale down.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I think really working together can produce something. Just like the airlines…
Charles Esche: …the Sky-team.
Manuel Borja-Villal: Not many medium-sized museums can become big enough and it will be difficult to find a form so the only way to do that is to work in collaboration internationally. Of course it will be very difficult to change the predominance of Tate or MoMa as they are self-sufficient. But they have a problem.. For example, recently they tried to re-hang the Abstract Impressionist rooms to modify the canonical story, but when you have 10 Barney Newmans, 10 Franz Klines, uncountable Jackson Pollocks and so on you are just too rich (laughing)… it is not so easy to write history from a different point of view. It becomes more a matter of real estate and even if I know that they are trying very hard, it is structurally impossible. In that sense, they will not be the museums of the future.
Charles Esche: We are trying in Eindhoven to write history on our own terms in a way, partly through thinking about re-enactments and reproductions. After all, the reason the big museum have the canonical works is because they have written the canon and in a sense they can’t escape that now. Yet it is also clear that the history of art we know needs to change. The trajectories of modernity that we have do not fit the current moment where we are no longer postmodern. What I find exciting today is that I feel that I am in a pre-period for the first time. All my life I have been in post-periods – post-war, post-socialism, post-colonialism, post-modernism, but now we have finally arrived in pre- to something that does not yet have a name.
Manuel Borja-Villal: Yes, I think we are in between, there is something happening, but we don’ know yet what it is. You feel like you are in the 14th century…
Charles Esche: In such a moment, it is really important to write history differently, to finish off the posts, as it were…but something else before we finish. Can I ask how do you share you thoughts about these matters with politicians? How do you persuade them of the cultural values that we share?**
Manuel Borja-Villal: That is very difficult. Because we have several level of politics. On the one hand we have some the surviving 19th century construction of the nation state. A model we know cannot hold anymore. But curiously enough, the more the world goes global the more we get into very rigid categories. Another element is populism, which comes in many extremes and from all political positions. Last but not least there is the remaining social democratic element, but with an aversion to anything that comes from outside that is immediately accused to be anti-system. That is another problem. **In this situation, we have first to convince the politicians that culture is a public service. Second for this service to be effective it cannot be instrumentalized, it has to be free. This is the radical element that has art in relation to other disciplines, it cannot be instrumentalized, otherwise it is not art anymore and it will stop. Third, especially in countries and places that are peripheral, that this is the moment for us to tell a different story. There is this tsunami coming from Asia and sometimes I have the feeling they are taking over the worst from us but we cannot follow the populist way that rejects the outside. But of course, if you talk to your trustees they listen with interest and ask why don’t you do a Schnabel exhibition or yet another Picasso exhibition…
Charles Esche: One thing that I see in this unbalanced triangle of economics, politics and culture is that the political has so failed to internationalize itself, while the economical side and the cultural side have clearly internationalized. I think we really have to ask why that is so, what are the systemic problems. We can expect nationalism of the nationalist parties, but of the neo-liberals or the social democrats you should be able to expect some kind of international vision. Traditionally neo-liberalism was not in alliance with nationalism, but that what we have now in the Netherlands very clearly. You see that politics is inadequate to the issues we were talking about, while we absolutely need a good politics to defend culture and enquiry. Alain Badiou wrote recently about the idea that there is only one world. This contradicts the “making worlds’ of the last Venice Biennial but I think it is a crucial point. We have to negotiate about this ‘one world’ and act within it. That is also where our thoughts on collaboration have to be grounded.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I agree there is no outside…probably the way to deal with this moment of crisis is to see cultural institutions like museums as places for real democracy, especially since we have this connection to memory and thinking about the future.
Charles Esche: If the museums recognise that there is only one world and, in a sense, only one public, then we can strengthen each other enormously. Politics would have to understand that the border of Eindhoven does not determine the understanding of the citizen. In a way we could say that the generation of René Daniëls was part of the last generation that really was from Eindhoven, or any particular place. The generation now might live in Eindhoven but they are looking at everything, everywhere - the access to information is completely different. René had his stroke in 1987, which was just before the world changed. The “Eindhoven niet Eindhoven” painting somehow captures this. Now the connections and underground rivers run fast. Yet I am also struck by how contemporary his work can be today. He is at a turning point in many ways.
Manuel Borja-Villal: I think a new world is opening but I don’t want to build a myth around it. We should just take that chance.
Charles Esche: Thank you for this inspiring talk.
