metropolis m

The crisis into which art was plunged by the radical budget cuts to the arts and culture has prompted artists to rethink how they function in society. Here is a discussion about autonomy and engagement with Matthijs de Bruijne and Jonas Staal.The letter that the State Secretary for Culture sent to the Dutch Parliament on 10 June 2011, announcing a €200 million reduction in arts funding, struck art lovers in the Netherlands like a bombshell. Halbe Zijlstra, the cool technocrat, had drawn up a plan of his own, dismissing preliminary Arts Council advice. At once it became clear that the Dutch cultural landscape would no longer be the same for some time. Art was expected to stand on its own feet, according to the neoliberal concept of increasing its own income.The art world can prepare itself for a long and hard battle. If, in the initial reactions, the protest against the disproportionately high level of the reductions in arts funding played a major role, and if the hope then was to reverse those reductions, in the meantime, there is a growing realization that work has to be done to change the way art is supported in society at large. The question here is whether artists themselves actually believe this and what they can do about it. Where the position of art in society is concerned, what does an artist need to believe in, and what position can he or she take? What can an artist actually mean at this point in time? Should artists be rebelling against the neoliberal shift? Must artists unite in order to have a stronger position, or can artists today still act and work autonomously, concerning themselves with such issues as beauty and form?

Trash Museum

One person who has spent some time embedding his artistic practice in the social context is Matthijs de Bruijne. Last year, he worked closely with cleaners affiliated with the FNV (Federation of Dutch Trade Unions) labour union in order to establish a Museum of Trash at the Central Train Station in Utrecht. The museum is intended to reveal what cleaners (usually unseen) in fact mean to our society. What was interesting about this collaboration is that as an artist, De Bruijne was invited and employed for the purpose of contributing to the campaigns. ‘For me, it is very important to operate within a social movement, as well as being able to continue working as an artist. It may even be true that, as an artist, I can work more freely for a trade union than in the art world. With both, I am dealing with rules of the game to which an artist is bound, but because the trade union people were convinced that an artist is capable of moving mountains, my experience has been that more possibilities are created in order to make issues truly visible. Operating at a distance from the art world has made that clear to me.’ De Bruijne is referring here to a situation in contemporary art which has become very topical since the budget cuts. On the one hand, there is a market system that completely consumes artists and their work (whether it is political in nature or not). On the other, there is art that expressly distances itself from anything that has so much as a whiff of the market, devoting itself entirely to social concerns. For each of these, where does their autonomy lie? A year ago, in an interview in an issue of Open devoted to the economic cutbacks, De Bruijne stated that if he wanted to really operate politically, he would have to sacrifice some of his artistic autonomy. His experience with the FNV has led him to readjust that belief. ‘I have slowly become convinced that an artist can be both autonomous and political at the same time. The only essential question is: Who are you working for? In the case of a traditional work of art, you are also ultimately working for a specific group of people, but within a more liberal concept of art. The biggest problem in the Netherlands is not so much the autonomous position of the artist in itself, but that we at this moment in time are using aesthetics that are indecipherable to people outside the art world. As artists, we should learn to make work that is easier for people to read and that relates more powerfully to the questions that matter in the Netherlands today.’

Occupy

The connection between art and society – and the role that the autonomous position of the artist plays in this – is something to which Jonas Staal is also strongly committed, but in a different way. Over the last year, a major portion of his work has been done in close collaboration with the Occupy movement. He recently added his New World Summit project at the Berlin Biennial, in a framework in which all kinds of protest movements were brought together for a conference. In contrast to De Bruijne, Staal seems less satisfied with the role of the artist as a discipline-transcending partner for social movements. He prefers to operate in the context of the art world itself, using it as a starting point to operate politically. As he himself expressed it in his article Tegen alle elites (Against All Elites), published on the Metropolis M website, ‘No art has ever existed that was apolitical. The artist is now the starting bid in an ideological battle, and that battle has to be fought with all we have.’ Point taken. Still, how can this battle be fought while the neoliberal powers of the (free) market are generating so many practical restrictions? How does an artist manage not to lose his shirt without becoming elitist or losing sight of the ideological struggle in which he wants to engage? ‘I work together with a range of different organizations,’ Jonas Staal explains, ‘with other artists and art institutes, but also with political organizations, political parties and private organizations. This reduces dependency on any specific source of income, and therefore also the dependency on the inherent criteria that they set up. I avoid what is referred to as the “free market”, which is not free, because it has been subsidized to death in order to maintain the power monopolies of certain businesses. I also equally reject the idea of big government. Power corrupts, without exception. At the moment, I am very involved with other artists, economists and philosophers in trying to find a way out of that deadlock: a rejection of both the (un-) free market and the state. Every form of power consolidation has to be met with the greatest possible distrust. Until that time, it seems to me to be important to work within contexts that are as broad as possible, in order to ensure independence, although this is nothing more than a temporary solution for a fundamental problem. That problem is the democratic deficit of our society, which is the result of this power monopoly.’One thing that Jonas Staal and Matthijs de Bruijne in any case have in common is their conviction that art cannot simply surrender itself to its own visual language and meanings. It cannot operate from the notion of neutrality, because (now more than ever) it has to be permeated in order to become a fully-fledged part of that society. Artists have to position themselves in the heart of society and, as Jonas Staal, puts it, ‘demand the right to shape the political, social, economic and ideological conditions that determine their practice’. He reminds us that art is always in service of something, quoting the words of Andrea Fraser: ‘We are all always already serving.’ To which he adds, ‘The only question is, what are the ideals that we want to serve?’Huib Haye van der Werf is a curator, writer and fine arts advisor