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Love Thy Neighbourhood
The Revival of Community Arts

Transvaal ‘All-In’: breakfast from the Turkish baker’s, followed by pampering at a beauty clinic or hairdressing salon, a musing ramble around the wastelands, and a homely evening meal at an old-fashioned Dutch café or something spicier at a Turkish restaurant. The Hague district of Transvaal can offer its hotel guests an unforgettable problem-area weekend. And, as one of the first such guests, Ella Vogelaar, Dutch Minister for Housing, Communities and Integration, checked into Hotel Transvaal late last June.The hotel, conceived by designer Jan Konings, is the most recent project by the mobile development agency OpTrek, which has been infiltrating the Transvaal district with temporary art projects since 2002. Artists and local shopkeepers take advantage of houses due for demolition and new buildings awaiting their first tenants or purchasers to install hotel rooms. Local residents provide reception services and each guest receives a district map for exploring the area. Moving house from one condemned property to the next, OpTrek, an initiative of Sabrina Lindemann and Annechien Meier, has been studying the drastic restructuring scheme that will continue to grip the Transvaal district until 2014. This operation, lasting over 15 years, involves the demolition of some three thousand dwellings – about a third of the present stock – to make way for 1,600 new homes, most of them in a higher price class. Lindemann lived in Transvaal and was fascinated by what she saw happening around her. She wondered what part art might play in that kind of process. As an artist, was she indeed capable of making any significant contribution?OpTrek seeks an autonomous standpoint from which it can issue a commentary on what is happening; at the same time, the artists’ initiative hopes its projects will serve some function for the neighbourhood. ‘If all you’re interested in is making “free” art, this is the wrong place for you,’ Lindemann explains. ‘It’s a matter of seeking a dialogue within a certain field of tension: what can you do, how far can you go? On the one hand, there’s the artistic commentary, which if need be can be quite abstract. But on the other, there’s the need to find a connection with the neighbourhood and its residents.’

Political Support

Political forces have been to a large extent responsible for the elevated interest for art in neighbourhoods. Following two political assassinations, the Netherlands has been seeking ways to breathe new life into a sundered community, and politicians have been increasingly keen to promote art as a potential binding factor. This has been evident, for example, in a series of penned portraits of large-city councillors holding art portfolios, recently published in the newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Councillor Carolien Gehrels aims at a transformation of all Amsterdam residents into cultural citizens, ‘which fosters relations between people in the neighbourhood, so you end up with “super districts”’. In the words of her Rotterdam counterpart Orhan Kaya, ‘Culture should no longer be the exclusive territory of the ethnic-majority upper crust.’[1] Jetta Klijnsma, Councillor for Culture in The Hague, is earmarking additional funds for community-art related activities which are located, as she puts it, ‘at the intersection of culture, education and welfare.’ ‘Join In’ is the motto of her policy, which aims to get everyone, including the art institutions, to contribute to the integration of all the city’s inhabitants.[2]The art world can no longer remain aloof, among other things because the issue of integration has a direct impact on the art institutions of the main cities. If the museums are not to become completely estranged from the cities that house them, they must develop programmes that attract local people from non-Western as well as Western cultural backgrounds. In response to political pressure, they are rushing en masse to establish educational programmes. The City and Language course offered by Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, for example, is a direct contribution to the integration programmes for refugee immigrants organized by ex-councillor Ahmed Aboutaleb. The Van Abbemuseum has similarly devised its own ‘integration course’, a wide-ranging programme called Be[com]ing Dutch which investigates new forms of community in the Netherlands (and which enters a new phase this autumn – see elsewhere in this issue).The latest trend among institutions is to set up neighbourhood branches. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is considering ‘taking to the streets’ in its homeless year 2008/2009; SMBA (Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam) had already established a residency in De Bijlmer, known as BijlmAIR, in collaboration with Artoteek Zuidoost; The Hague’s art library did the same in Ypenburg where a street museum has recently opened; and CBK Rotterdam is soon to open TENT. op Zuid, which will develop a programme pitched at the local residents.Mixed ZoneThere is a busy traffic of visitors to an apartment at Florijn 42 in De Bijlmer. The artist Daragh Reeves is shooting a film scene with two cool Bijlmer dudes for his production A Film, inspired by Hollywood action movies. Outdoors, artists Marjolijn Dijkman and Aletta de Jong are seeking edible and curative plants in the public gardens. Curator Andrew Cannon is out walking with the life-sized cuddly toy ‘Wiwi’ made by artists Jose de Gruyter and Harald Thys; two little girls skip gaily in their wake. The Go-Between, as this graduation production of De Appel’s curatorship course is called, consisted of a chain of projects by different participants in various locations, in many cases once-only events, spread out over ten days.Prior to the graduation presentation, the curators spent three months exploring De Bijlmer, working from an apartment in one of the district’s notorious tower blocks. They held afternoon and evening activities for local residents and art enthusiasts, including film screenings, hip-hop concerts, dialogues and group meals.In connection with the reviving interest in neighbourhood art projects, we increasingly hear the term ‘community arts’, as though those involved no longer feel any objection to being labelled with this somewhat maligned term in the art world.[3] Community arts, a Dutch import from the Anglo-Saxon world, places a priority on joint art production in and with the community, using materials from the community itself. Traditionally, it refers primarily to art forms in which collaboration is a matter of course, such as theatre, music and dance; but it takes in visual art too.[4] Community arts enjoyed a boom in the Netherlands in the 1990s, with the result that it has now become a permanent part of the arts programming of Vinex districts and other new town developments. Artists are invited to take part in artistic programmes which contribute to the much-wanted social cohesion in these new communities. In recent years, these projects have included Beyond in Leidsche Rijn (near Utrecht), WiMBY in Hoogvliet, Vario Mundo in Vathorst (near Amersfoort) and Het Blauwe Huis in IJberg (Amsterdam). A whole community-arts industry seems to have arisen, complete with artists who have entirely dedicated their work to this genre.Cultuurnet Nederland, a national expertise centre for cultural education, commissioned Sandra Trienekens to conduct research into community arts in the Netherlands, resulting in a substantial database of projects. She herself prefers the term ‘socially committed art projects’. ‘Use of the label “community arts” in official policies, and putting socially committed art into the same pigeonhole as amateur art or art education, results in these art projects being (artificially) detached from both the wider tradition of engagé art and from regular, productive artistic practice,’ Trienekens writes.[5] She considers this rift unjustifiable, and in her study she reemphasizes the link with the practising art world by associating socially-committed art projects with Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics and with the ‘Nieuw Engagement’ (New Commitment) concept defined by Rutger Pontzen in his small book Nice!, published in 2000.[6]The artistic value accorded to it is, however, not the biggest public image problem faced by community art. Recent studies such as that by Miwon Kwon have pointed out that the social ambitions of community arts projects are open to a certain amount of criticism. The desire to pay attention to minority groups is often counterproductive, due to the implicit power-relationship in which the artist treats the community as conforming to his or her own rigid image. Despite the good intentions, the community often ends up serving merely as a tool for realizing an artistic project, and is left standing and forgotten when the artist moves on to the next project.There is, moreover, a tendency in community arts to define groups unjustifiably as constituting an authentic, local community, whereas today’s society has a much more fluid character. A community is not so much a local as a temporal phenomenon.[7] Communities form and dissolve without developing an unequivocal relationship with the genius loci. Community arts appear to take insufficient account of this fact – in the Netherlands, as elsewhere, where most of the initiatives are still strongly localized in scope.One reason for this may be that the budget available for these initiatives is generally coupled to specific urban renewal projects. It is ‘percentage money’ (i.e. it forms a legally established percentage of every construction or urban development budget) and the municipalities concerned have no inclination to dispense that money for a geographically wider target. The neighbourhood has a right to that money, according to the conventional official standpoint that couples localities with integration, on the assumption that a neighbourhood can only succeed if it turns into a quasi-village. The project carried out by De Appel’s Curatorial Training Programme (CTP) in Amsterdam Zuidoost shows that reality is more complex, and that communities are harder to define and are highly mobile. The event admittedly took place in a specific neighbourhood, but artists mobilized their audiences separately for each project, without stigmatizing or stereotyping the local community into a specific role or identity (such as Antillean, Ghanaian, Islamic etc.). This is not to say that all the projects were equally successful in this respect, but that is another discussion.

Learning about Public Space

In recent months, 2,500 Rotterdam children took part in the art project Face Your World held in the Kunsthal by Jeanne van Heeswijk and Dennis Kaspori. The children designed their own ideal ‘museum park’ with the aid of an interactive computer program. The public gardens between the Kunsthal and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has been little more than a building site during the last few years, owing to the construction of an underground car park. Various problems brought the work to a standstill for quite a while. The children’s colourful designs now hang inspiringly on the fences surrounding the abandoned construction site.Jeanne van Heeswijk first implemented Face Your World in 2002 Ohio, USA, as part of a project for the Wexner Center for the Arts. She then developed the concept further together with the architect Dennis Kaspori and the philosopher Maaike Engelen, for the benefit of secondary school pupils (VMBO) in Slotervaart. This took the form of an ‘urban workshop’ where young people could gain practical education in the many possible meanings of public space. Van Heeswijk and Kaspori succeeded in obtaining a concrete locale in the neighbourhood where they could implement their design in practice. Slotervaart will soon be home to a park that young people from the district designed themselves, in close consultation with their family members and other local residents. ‘We want to reinvolve people in public space,’ Jeanne van Heeswijk explains, ‘so they can set their stamp on how it looks. That is a process you can organize, initiate, stage; it’s not a process of taking part for the pleasure of it, but of raising consciousness. If I intrude myself into the picture, it puts someone else in the shadow.’ The artistic value of this project does not lie primarily in the formal quality of the eventual design. The positive impulse comes, rather, from the opportunity it gives young people to picture the kind of environment they wish to have for themselves.According to the American sociologist Saskia Sassen, small, often temporary initiatives of this kind present a crucial counterweight to large- scale urban developments and the economic and political powers concealed behind them. In her view, people – and she looks hopefully to artists and architects in this respect – can exploit the gaps in the city, the unused spaces, both physical and immaterial ones. She argues that, ‘there is also a kind of public-making work that can produce disruptive narratives, and make it legible to the local and the silenced.’[8]Jeroen Boomgaard, who is studying art in public space from a Dutch perspective in his role as lecturer on the subject for SKOR and the Rietveld Academy, warns of the danger of government and market players funding or even employing artists to contribute to an improved residential climate in cities: ‘The artistic alternative may succeed in imbuing the status quo with a conscience or making it seem more light-hearted, without actually changing anything.’[9] The risk is that it will remove the sting of socially committed art projects and so undermine their critical potential.Considering the eagerness with which political circles are currently embracing community arts, Boomgaard’s critique seems more urgent than ever. Artists like Sabrina Lindemann or Jeanne van Heeswijk are aware of the hazards but wonder what else they can do. Should they stand at the roadside waving banners? Should they withdraw into the safe haven of the art world? Neither option attracts them much. So, for better or worse, they continue seeking temporary alliances between people and financiers to make possible an event that cuts across all conceivable artistic and sociopolitical boundaries.[1] NRC Handelsblad, portrait series of arts councillors for the major cities: Orhan Kaya by Mark Hoogstad on 24 April 2007, Carolien Gehrels by Ron Rijghard on 27 April 2007, summarizing article by Maartje Somers on 28 April 2007.[2] Jetta Klijnsma, Met een open blik, government policy paper, November 2006[3] In Cultuurnota 2005-2008, the Council for Culture places community arts under the heading of amateur art. ‘Characteristic of community arts are (…) a social/societal thematic and a heavy welfare component,’ the Council writes. The text follows by stressing that it relates to ‘making art with high artistic goals’, not mere creative hobbyism. [4] See the Community Arts Database, which documents over a hundred community arts projects in the Netherlands.[5] Sandra Trienekens, Kunst en sociaal engagement. Een analyse van de relatie tussen kunst, de wijk en de gemeenschap, Cultuurnetwerk Nederland, Utrecht 2006, p. 7. www.cultuurnetwerk.nl [6] Rutger Pontzen, Nice! New Commitment in the Visual Arts, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000.[7] Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another, MIT Press, Cambridge 2002.[8] Saskia Sassen, ‘Public Interventions. The Shifting Meaning of the Urban Condition’, OPEN no. 11, 2006.[9] Jeroen Boomgaard, ‘Radical Autonomy. Art in the Era of Process Management’, OPEN no. 10, 2006. Jeanne van Heeswijk – Het Blauwe Huis

Lotte Haagsma

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