The Pliable Park
The Pliable Park
Sonsbeek through the Years
At the start of Sonsbeek 2008 Grandeur, curator Anna Tilroe is having 24 works of art carried in a procession through the streets of Arnhem, before they are installed at their respective locations in Sonsbeek Park. The procession, carried out by special guilds, represents the dialectic between art, the city and the park, which has been part of this outdoor exhibition since 1971. In this context, how does the recent edition of Sonsbeek relate to its illustrious past? It was Wim Beeren who made Sonsbeek what it is today: an exhibition of contemporary art in public space, for which new presentation concepts are always being sought. Sonsbeek buiten de perken broke off from the classic sculpture exhibition that it had hitherto been and presented the state of the art of sculpture. This took the art far outside the park, into the city and the countryside, all over the world. Many feel that Sonsbeek has never since been so radical. The exhibition by Wim Beeren, as Jan Hoet referred to it during the Sonsbeek exhibition that he organized in 2001, was ‘the monumental quantité incontoumable’.[1] This summer’s most recent edition by Anna Tilroe is more modest in ambition, even if the key phrase, ‘grandeur’ suggests otherwise. She in any case is celebrating the object status of the exhibited works, something that was unthinkable in the non-material edition of 1971.
Park and Art as Artificial Construction
Sonsbeek buiten de perken may have been a bespoke exhibition, but it also generated negative reactions from the general public and from Dutch artists, who had always been closely involved in realizing the exhibitions. It took 15 years before the people of Arnhem had recovered from the shock of 1971 and were willing to support a new Sonsbeek exhibition. Sonsbeek 86 was totally different, primarily because its curator, Saskia Bos, limited herself to the park itself. In the exhibition catalogue, she emphasized that most of the selected artists had distanced themselves from ‘outdoor sculptures’. Because more than ever, as she wrote, works of art are artificial products that do not adapt to nature, let alone let themselves be absorbed by it.[2] Bos reacted against Sonsbeek 71, but like all the curators who would follow, her thinking was from what Camiel van Winkel, in Als de kunst erom vraagt. De Sonsbeektentoonstellingen 1971, 1986, 1993, referred to as the ‘opposite location/dislocation’.[3] With participants including Marcel Broodthaers, Luciano Fabro and Claes Oldenburg, along with many young artists, Sonsbeek 86 was a surprise. They hardly still seemed to represent the timeliness of art at that time. Nonetheless, Sonsbeek 86 was indeed art of its day. It was a model of the postmodern exhibition, built on Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum concept, where form was seen as the highest achievable end and content as merely an illusion generated by a play of symbols. Viewers were seduced by the beauty of the surfaces of the art, while the division between art and decoration blurred and the autonomous work of art was rubbing up to the functional object. Core concepts included ‘the skin’ and ‘the casing’. Just as the park was unreal, with its rock groupings, lines of sight and artificial waterfalls, art too had become artificial. Artists made use of materials and constructions that seemed to be something they were not. Sonsbeek 86 offered an artificial, theatrical ambience for the art that it wished to display.
Engagement
Apart from the procession, Anna Tilroe has put Sonsbeek Park back at the centre of the exhibition. It seems, therefore, self-evident to see a relationship between Sonsbeek 10 and Sonsbeek 86. Nonetheless, this 2008 edition perhaps has more in common with Valerie Smith’s Sonsbeek 93 and Sonsbeek 9, by Jan Hoet. Valerie Smith was confronted with two earlier concepts. The first (1971) received international acclaim but had not left much of anything positive behind in the city that hosted it. The second (1986), did succeed in winning over the public, but earned almost no attention beyond the borders. The net for Sonsbeek 93 was cast far afield. Valerie Smith, who had earned her spurs in New York’s Artists’ Space, was a new type of curator. Where Saskia Bos had looked primarily at Europe, Smith showed developments in the United States, where in the early 1990s, the art discourse had reached the boiling point. As a reaction to the new conservatism in international politics, the AIDS crisis, political intervention in South America, the nuclear threat, the influence of the religious right and the threats to the civil rights of blacks and women, many artists and curators were changing course. Smith was clearly a representative of this politically engaged and historically aware group. It is therefore no wonder that most of her selected artists had no interest in a direct relationship to nature or to the park. Smith came up with a concept based on three rings: Sonsbeek Park as a recreational environment, the city of Arnhem as an urban environment and the Meinerswijk Polder on the edge of the city as a landscape environment. The artists were not only expected to relate to one of these three, but also had to engage with the socio-cultural or historic dimension of their chosen location. As the correspondence indicates, she called on the artists to count not so much on the quality of their artistic concepts, but on the degree of their commitment. They were requested to work on location, which most of the artists – about 40 from 10 countries – actually did.[4] They investigated the history of the city, which in the eyes of Smith, the American, was primarily about the Second World War and the Battle of Arnhem, but they found more points of departure, such as colonial history or the relationship between North Arnhem and South Arnhem. Many of their chosen subjects were in fact not specific to Arnhem, such as homosexuality, abject forms of sexuality, references to HIV contagion and AIDS, environmental issues or personal histories.
The Artist Back in the Centre
The Sonsbeek exhibitions keep coming back to the same questions: what do you do with the park when the art (actually) does not require it, and what do you do with the relationship between the park and the city or urban life? Every answer given by one curator has led to a critique from the following curator. The waters were stirred once again in LocusFocus, by Jan Hoet in 2001. After Valerie Smith’s exhibition, which communicated badly, the committee chose the experienced, extroverted, charismatic and indefatigable Jan Hoet, who had proven that he did not shy away from projects for a large public. Although his Documenta did not hold a candle to his Chambres d’Amis, expectations for his plans for Arnhem remained unflinchingly high. Hoet had received the message all too clearly and in his foreword to the catalogue, he emphasized that what he was concerned with was ‘clarity’, ‘legibility’ and ‘tangibility’. In addition, addressing the artists, he emphasized the freedom that he wanted to grant the artists to meet the challenge of the location. ‘Focus on the location through the eyes of the art.’[5] What were also noteworthy where the many, if superficial, similarities to Valerie Smith’s concept. Where she had referred to three rings and three environments, Jan Hoet spoke of three ‘biotopes’, which were consistent with Smith’s three types of location. This of course primarily concerned the park, a location which for Hoet referred to a tradition as well as symbolizing a culture, followed by the centre of Arnhem, which in Hoet’s case was limited to the Eusebius Church, a site intimately bound to the history and the heart of the city, and finally the Kronenburg shopping centre, a new, socio-economic centre on the other side of the river (in 1993, as mentioned, Smith chose the Meiners District). The intention was to bring the dialectic of the local and global to life, with ‘Arnhem as a blueprint for contemporary urban life.’[6]
Art as Today’s Religion
With Jan Hoet, belief in art, the almost unconditional faith in the artist, was back. Anne Tilroe shares that with him. She even goes a step further by not only asking the artists to imagine our human pursuit of greatness, but to bring this in connection with what Tilroe sees as their social duty. In this, she is again closer to Valerie Smith, in terms of the value she attributes to morals. It is a concept that continues to reappear in her speeches. In the essays she has published in recent years, she has on several occasions spoken of the need for art to take part in the social debate, be it about Europe or about the need for new symbols.[7] But why Grandeur, as a title? How does the drama of this word rhyme with the seriousness of taking an ethical stand? We will soon see. Tilroe is certainly convinced that the artists she has invited, including Jean-Michel Othoniel, Johan Creten, Johan Simons, Hans van Houwelingen, Lara Schnitger, Marijke van Warmerdam, Rini Hurkmans and Rona Pondick have understood her ideas and are very capable of interpreting them.[8] With the procession, Tilroe is doing something that many artists have done before her: ease art away from the association with worn-out, rigid religious rituals and symbols, or indeed from the banality of the carnival procession. The importance of symbolism must in fact be primarily sought in the power of creating symbols and their visual potential, not in the symbols themselves, let alone the origins of these symbols. At the same time, the procession must retain a cerebral quality. The artworks are literally and figuratively carried by ‘small communities’ recruited from amongst the residents of Arnhem. In another exhibition under the auspices of the Arnhem Museum of Modern Art, entitled Carried Away, the phenomenon of the procession and art will receive more attention, but in Grandeur: Sonsbeek 2008, the art will be mostly finding its way back from city life to nature. For the secular among us, this will mean grinning and bearing it, as it will for the modernists. It is indirectly criticizing the principal path that modern art of the 20th century followed: that of its own autonomy, freedom from vested interests, its individualism and specialization, or to put it differently, the results of this development, such as disinterest in social responsibility and isolation as a result of spending too long on self-reflection. It seems paradoxical that she again ends up at a park in the English landscape style as a decor for art. Is it not true that the cradle of autonomy and lack of ulterior interests in art was Romanticism, with its emphasis on the experience of nature and reflecting on nature? Unlike the previous Sonsbeek exhibitions, these works of art, however diverse they may be, again have to relate to the nature of the park, on the one hand in the awareness that this nature is not so natural, that the intervention of mankind is always visible (the thin connection to the Sonsbeek of Saskia Bos), and on the other hand, in the fact that what you can find in nature cannot be found elsewhere. Marga van Mechelen
Marga van Mechelen
