Art Honky on the Multikulti Front
Art Honky on the Multikulti Front
Interview with Jonas Ohlsson
He has lived and worked in Amsterdam’s Zuidoost district for years, speaks the language, listens to the music, organizes parties and exhibitions, and recently even opened up his own gallery, called ‘Fuck’. Jonas Ohlsson is an ‘art honky’ who has found his niche in the black ghetto.
Could you start by telling me about the chaos you caused with that e-mail you sent out? In it, you simply said we should ‘get off our asses’ and finally come down to the Bijlmer instead of always just talking about being multicultural. To quote: ‘ART HONKIES COME ON – SHAPE THE FUCK UP NOW! Get off your fat asses and leave the grachtengordel for one weekend! Or I will have Lex ter Braak and the Mondriaan Stichting revoke ALL your art stipendias!’
‘On the one hand, I think the anger came from me sending out the e-mail as bcc, ‘blind carbon copy’. So it got very personal, people couldn’t see that it was a mass mailing. So, of course, people that had already done good things in the Bijlmer or worked with multiculti themes elsewhere, people like David Bade, Gijs Muller, Matthijs de Bruine or Ad de Jong, felt singled out for no justifiable reason. On the other, it came from people who were getting tired of me trying to look like the cool guy who is hip to everything black. They got tired of my “mad dog whigger stance” – and maybe they have a point there. But it also came from me saying nice things about De Appel and in the ‘ruff and tuff’ anarchistic artist circles that I move in, that is like pissing on a priest in a church on a Sunday.’
Do you mean the artists you hang out with are not ‘De Appel’ artists?
‘No, I don’t hang out with any De Appel artists! Except Otto Berchem, but I hardly know the guy, we watch football together in O’Reillys. Death is too dramatic, but at the least, ATHLETE’S FOOT to all De Appel artists! For collaborating with the enemy, the people of the books, the curators. Liam “the communist” Gillick especially. De Appel used to be the art institute that I hated most on this planet. I’m not kidding! If you see art as war without the body bags, De Appel was certainly my main enemy. We’ll talk about that some other time. When it comes to criticizing De Appel, I know where to start but I don’t know where to stop.
Ann Demeester changes things, though. The reason that I liked Ann Demeester’s moving the white cube curate-whore church from the grachtengordel [Amsterdam’s pricey inner-city canal belt, ed.] to the ghetto was not that it gave us better, more exiting art but that it gave us a lot of projects that totally failed. It exposed the fact that if you take away the normal, safe context for art – white, middle class, “up” surroundings – things really get difficult and interesting. In the multiculti debate, I am a firm believer in the Dr. Phil philosophy of “stepping out of your comfort zone” or to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what Moroccan hangjongeren [juvenile loafers and delinquents] can do for the Stedelijk Museum but ask what YOU can do for a bubbling party in the Bijlmer Sporthal.”
For every fat old white guy from Apeldoorn that we autochtonen [natives] send to a Ragga Party in Tha Spot in the Bijlmer – I still haven’t figured out if I am a allochtoon [immigrant, often implying people of colour] or not (I’m Swedish) –, we get one cute black girl with a huge butt to take to the Kurt Schwitters exhibition.’
Is it always going to be ‘them’ and ‘us’? Do we need these separations to make more interesting work?
‘Yes, I think art will always tend to be quite “us & them”. Art is a very slow and space-bound art form. Ideas that come from art don’t travel outside of art as fast or as easily as those coming from music, for example. This has a lot to do with the fact that no one has found a good way to digitalize it yet. So art is not very democratic as a shape or form. Music is a digitalised art form, and in these internet times this means that ideas in music travel with the speed of light. As a DJ, I play Favela Funk from Rio, Kwaito House from South Africa, Kuduro Acid from Angola and Ghetto Tech from Detroit and all these musical styles could be mixed seamlessly, if I only knew how to mix. Within minutes, they all borrow ideas, attitudes and techniques from each other and from their own local cultures. In art, this development would take years or decades. With music, you could live on Greenland your whole life and still be the hippest disco cat on earth. With art, you need to spend a year in New York or London just to see what is going on and to learn.’
So are you saying we should be seeing art as a white Western invention that is nevertheless open to everyone?
‘Most contemporary art openings are as open to “outsiders” as Compton is to chubby white tourists who want to meet Dr.Dre and get some ghetto booty. I am talking from my own experience here. I’m not saying that it is impossible to penetrate “the other”, either ghetto booty or art openings. I’m just saying that it will take a lot of love, time, energy and passion to do it. And I think that it is important to realize that contemporary art is made with a very specific audience in mind. Most art is not made for people who live in Amsterdam Zuidoost.
That said, I am actually quite pro-elitism. I think art should stop trying to play nice and be all things to all people. So what if it’s made for white middle class and “up” people (and progressive types of all colours)? Hey Ho, Let’s Go! Here we could learn from fashion, jewellery and champagne companies. They didn’t get the attention they now have in the black hip-hop world by dumbing down their product or message. They did it by staying exclusive and elitist. Art could just say: Yes, contemporary art is indeed only for very rich or very smart people and if you’re not very smart or very rich…FUCK OFF!!! That would attract more people to art than trying to be all soft, nice and inclusive.’
Do you think any of these art projects devised in, as you say, ‘the grachtengordel’ can succeed in the Bijlmer?
‘Sure! Don’t forget that all kinds of different people live in the Bijlmer, even art lovers. I like art and I live in the Bijlmer. But, of course, you can stereotype and generalize about the Bijlmer quite a bit – and the grachtengordel too, for that matter. I am now working together with Imagine IC to do some art here in the Bijlmer, and they are quite conservative and are constantly afraid that my invitation flyers will be too sexually explicit or cause controversy – which is strange, considering that you have a VERY sexually explicit big-butt-party flyer and poster culture here in the Bijlmer.
But to answer your question: Yes, you can succeed with “grachtengordel art” in the Bijlmer. To do that I think you have to either play with the given context – Darragh Reeves’ film (which later got stolen) did that beautifully and was a big success – or totally ignore the context and just do your thing. Diego Fernandez’s lamb-grilling performance was great and his half-naked noise performance at the final party of the CTP project shocked people quite a bit, but it was still enjoyed by all since he is just very honest and raw.
The problem with the “art world reaching out to Bijlmer” context is that we are part of the entertainment industry. We are impatient, sexy sluts…we give the world one-night stands! The art world likes to mingle with world problems because it makes us look good, but we never really have the patience or time to get intimate on a deeper level. De Appel has left the Bijlmer, just as Manifesta left Cyprus, to move on to the next thing. And herein lies the dilemma of these types of projects. Did Ann Demeester do the Bijlmer any good, or did the Bijlmer only make Ann Demeester look good?’
Maxine Kopsa