If we are to believe the polls, the political age of our prime-minister Balkenende, Harry Potter Senior, will soon be coming to an end. Geert Wilders, who was recently 'outed' a bleached-blonde half-blood will be assuming the throne. Who ever imagined that the drama of the multicultural society would reach such an apotheosis? What does it say about the idea of assimilation, represented in such exemplary fashion by our Indonesian compatriots?
I do not much identify with the one-issue man from Venlo, but the Dutch electorate has embraced this blond katjang as the ultimate champion in the collective war against foreigners. For me, gay and touched by the tarbrush, these are confusing times. First Pim and now Geert.
Not another word need be spent here on the will of the people, but precisely because it is art (after love of the market – or better said, at the same time as love of the market) that still views Marx as a reference point and claims itself to be a critical answer to today’s populism, I too would like to make my contribution to the discussion in these art-minded pages. This will not be a political column, though it may well be time to adorn the pages of METROPOLIS M with a touch of political commentary. Admit it, dear editors, now that, in line with Marx’s theory, we reflect on a praxis, the famed exposé of art can no longer be brought back to an article here and an essay there. J’accuse, preferably accompanied by some dialectics! And yes, I know, this is an old issue already thrown out there by relational aesthetics, but as timely as it is temporary, the question of art or design that should or should not have social legitimacy still seems to be waiting in the wings.
As an extension of the socially orientated perspective, my own question is not so much how art but, first and foremost, how design will change shape. Although the issue of social legitimacy has been around for years, design has been happy to completely avoid it. In the last decade, Dutch Design has merely rolled around in its own fame, again and again represented as such in the media. It has been years since a different mirror than that of its own success has been held up to Dutch Design, and this can not only be blamed on Dutch Design itself. The collective yearning for success, notably commercial success, was so great that absolutely everything was done by the whole infrastructure of foundations, subsidies and museums to keep this success aloft. Now that the market has lost its glamour, the ultimate legitimacy of Dutch Design as ‘successful’ design is also immediately under pressure. Design will once again have to relate to different, possibly even social issues.
The only question is, how? In the last few years, the anonymous figure of the designer has been transformed into a star performer for whom the personal signature is paramount. How does a designer like this relate to a social environment? Dutch Design is moreover famed for its conceptual working method and commentary tone, and has consequently taken on a so-called meta-character. The relationship between product and user has thereby been radically altered. In contrast to efforts to achieve a certain neutrality of the object, which can subsequently become meaningful through its use, most of the meta-products of Dutch Design already have layered meanings in themselves. Our relationship with such objects is not based on intimacy, fed by everyday use, but on a more intellectually reflective, distant relationship that primarily comes about by way of how they look. The meta-character of such objects is well served by a direct communications environment, such as that of the media, but can only with difficulty relate to a more social domain and to such concepts as the user, the process, interactivity, informality and coincidence.
My plea is partly pragmatic. Use the label of Dutch Design and take advantage of the meta-qualities of many designers, but inject their perspective with a utopian desire, which does not then have to be reduced to old or personal forms of commentary, nor to the universalist principles of modernism. In addition, a start has to be made towards seeing our environment other than in terms of a market. I have already expressed this plea in this magazine (see Guus Beumer, Louise Schouwenberg, METROPOLIS M, No 1, 2004), but I remain convinced that if designers were to become more sensitive to seeing their own surroundings as a social environment, they could once again give shape to the processes that determine our lives. If not, designers are doomed to shaping nothing more than our age-old fixation on the latest and the newest.
At the heart of this question lies the role of the patron. Dutch Design is the result of designers who determine their own agendas and themselves come up with their own final products. The so-called self-producing designer was the powerful answer to the withdrawal of government and to industries moving out of the country. But from whence should today's clientele come? My concern is that without a customer, designers are capable of producing nothing more than metaphors about durability, safety and community, and however valuable these might be, today's times demand more than a metaphor. Yet where is that customer in a period in which politics are sunk in populism and the market has lost its vitality?
The cultural institutes in the Netherlands, in any case, seem willing to give visibility to a number of social issues. Take, for example, Stroom, in the Hague, and their focus on the autonomy of food; Utrecht Manifest, with its search for social design; and the Architecture Biennial in Rotterdam, with its debate on the open city. These organizations do not simply fall for the market objective of large audience numbers, but are willing to address such questions as these, which are completely unseen in the current socio-political climate.
This has not resolved the issue of the patron, the person for whom design is made, but I do see a few specks of light at the end of the tunnel, in which citizens are manifesting themselves as clients, as those seeking and commissioning design. We can refer to private initiatives whereby people build their own schools – sometimes from the standpoint of a philosophy, often from a desire for smaller classes and more personal and intensive education. This new citizenry has moreover expanded by way of various groups, including the Transition Town movement. On its own, without political interference, this movement has developed answers to issues of health, food production and education, and has even developed its own assessment system, so that it can function outside the current money system. Although such initiatives primarily propagate a do-it-yourself ideology, they can nonetheless tap into new potential for design, if only by setting an example.
Art has already discovered the arrival of the New Citizen. E-Flux – at the Frieze Art Fair, no less – recently presented a project entitled Time/Bank, by Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle, which invited artists to develop new models for alternative monetary systems.
Guus Beumer is director of Marres and the NAiM/Bureau Europa, both in Maastricht. He was artistic director for Utrecht Manifest, 2009.
Translation: Marie Shields
Columns: Urgent
