Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Before I start I would like to extend a word of thanks to Maurice Bogaert for asking me to be a part of his artwork and to speak to you all tonight. It’s not every day that you get to be part of something as special as this. I would also like to extend a word of thanks to Dr. Marta Zarzycka and Maria Hlavajova from BAK. During the second half of the first semester of my master Comparative Women’s Studies in Culture and Politics I took a course that was taught by them. The course was called “Curating (Beyond) Exhibitions: Critical Curatorial Practices and Contemporary Society” and has informed what I am going to be talking to you about tonight. I would also like to acknowledge my mother, Glenda Martinus, who is also present tonight, and her strength and thank her for being who she is. And although the list of people that I would like thank extends well beyond these who are mentioned, and I mean you too Janina Pigaht, I would like to finally thank the crowd of one with whom I hope to continue sparring well within and beyond the restrictions that we impose on ourselves and make us who we are.

This last thank you is also a segue into the topic that I want to talk about tonight. The hybrid of an artwork and exhibition that is Opening: The Show is all about restrictions. The concept that Maurice came up with makes us aware of the levels of permeability and instability of concepts such as distance, time, location and the practices connected in openings, art institutions and the institutionalization of art. The artwork itself is one that defies size. A topic that Maurice continues to deal with in several different forms. hOUTSKOOL for example, the artzine that he and friends put together, has as slogan “A5 is the new 16 mm”. This is a reference to the freedom that 16 mm camera’s gave to artists. The introduction of the 16 mm enabled a freedom that extended well beyond the studio setting and took the camera into the real world. It allowed artists to use the film and video format for their own creative output. And it also brought with it an understanding that film and video could be more than just popular fodder for the masses or a means for soap makers to sell their products. In form and content hOUTSKOOL manages to do the same. It can be used in a way to actively engage with art, artists, ideologies, visual language and grammar.

Opening: The Show (from here on out referred to as OTS), does the same to the institutional settings of art and its corollaries in certain regards. A simplistic description of the artwork would amount to the following: the artwork is comprised of an exhibition in which 6 different organizations and networks that are part of the art world in the province of Utrecht get a space and 4 openings of the exhibition in the new exhibition space of the Centrum voor Beeldende Kunst Utrecht (from here on out referred to as CBKU) on the Plompetorengracht 4 in Utrecht. The 6 different organizations, Das Bilt, Expodium, Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht, Kunsthal Kade, Kunstliefde and Z25.org. Each organization received a small scale model recreation of a cut out of part of the new exhibition space. These 6 each chose their mode of curating their model scale. The 6 individual exhibitions that is the result of this distribution are filmed 24 hours a day via webcam and then brought together via the website http://www.kunstinutrecht.nl/OTS. Upon visiting the exhibition space of the CBKU, as you all did tonight, the visitor enters into a black space in which one is presented a panoramic view of the space through the models via an installation of 6 televisions that are connected to the webcam feeds. When walks into the space however one is confronted with the dotted lines in the space denoting where Maurice divided the space for the creation of his scale models. The openings of OTS are themselves set up as stage productions. When you all came in tonight you were handed a booklet with information on the artwork/exhibition and a red piece of paper with the program for tonight. As you can read the program is actually a script with everybody who’s involved in one capacity or another mentioned and what they’re supposed to do. All the players of these plays also have badges on with their names and their roles for tonight.

After hearing the organizational size of the project your natural reaction to scratch behind your ears, wondering why I called that the simplistic description, is valid. In its construction, through the use of various media and the amount of people involved to bring you tonight and the work, it’s actually anything but simplistic. This set up of various organizations and networks curating exhibitions as part of an exhibition reminded me of a Biennale in a sense. As John Miller has said “the purpose of the mega-exhibition is to offer a comprehensive survey of artworks on a demographic basis”. One could say that OTS purports the same by showing the viewer what’s going on in the arts in the province Utrecht thereby involving various agents of this scene ranging from local art school students to new media artists to artist collectives to artist initiatives to art centers. All involved are presented seemingly “intelligible to all the others”. As a columnist I also received a briefing on the background of tonight and how it came to be. Initially the CBKU called out for ideas to open the new space. In that call they stressed the need to become a unifying agent of the various art networks that can be found in Utrecht. Where I initially had some questions on the manner in which this showcasing of art could presuppose a horizontalized art scene in Utrecht, I have now actually come to another understanding of tonight, and the other opening nights, and my role.

As tonight’s speaker, and actually the first speaker of the event, I am also part of the question marks that I have sensed have been placed throughout the work. The theatricality of the openings is part of Maurice’s larger investigation on the staging of everyday life. Here however the podium is not everyday life but the art scene. Particularly the spaces through which and in which art is presented, is found and appropriates and forms audiences, artists, institutions, thought, policy, movement, time and distance. By breaking up the exhibition space of the CBKU and by building two additional temporary walls in the space the sanctity and tranquility of the white cube has been destroyed with Maurice’s infectious laugh as a soundtrack. Bits and pieces of this white cube have literally been sent flying throughout the province. The space that was is no more. And that isn’t only pertaining to the current white cube design of the exhibition space. It’s also a description of the development of the CBKU over the years. It is no longer the same organization it was in 1991, 1992, 2005, 2006 and 2009. Here in Utrecht and now in 2010 it is attempting to be(come) something other. The destruction of the notion of a wholeness of an art space, here also illustrated by the dotted lines in the material exhibition space of the CBKU, is a critical art practice of institutional critique. By making this assertion I’m following Chantal Mouffe’s understanding of critical art practices as the practices that are necessary for reconstituting and challenging symbolic orders. It is in that sense that she notes the role that art plays in “the dimension of antagonism which [is] constitutive of human societies”, the political.

As mentioned in the beginning of this talk, I read this artwork/exhibition as being about restrictions and boundaries; the boundaries between art practices, art institutions, artists and art spaces. Its setup also shows the boundaries on thought over art; it presented as complete but can’t ever be complete. The bits and pieces that were sent flying don't properly fit back into the mould of this space. But that doesn't present a problem that needs to be fixed. The exhibition space isn’t whole so why present it as if it can be read whole? If you open up the map of the space that was at the back of the booklet that you received, and piece them together you'll see that there is a space missing that isn’t shown via the scale models. Something is escaping your view if you think that the scale models put together can become the totality of the space. They can't. Just like the desire to see everything and be able to account for all the possible ways an art space can be seen, will never be satisfied. I would like for you, at the end of this talk of course, to find that space that isn't seen and stand in it. I want you to feel the manner in which Maurice has revealed the ideological fallacies of the white cube as being detached from everyday life. Simon Sheikh for instance notes “the neutralizing and universalizing white cube of the art institution” as “the bourgeois public sphere par excellence”; of being oppressively neutral and conventional and normal and supposedly speaking for us all. In the bundle of the lecture series NOW IS THE TIME Robert S. Nelson illustrates the canonical state of the white cube and the oppressive antagonistic conventions that it brings along with it. He highlights two exhibitions that clearly illustrate how the space in which art hangs can’t be neutralized through cosmetic interventions. Putting up white walls won’t take the history of a place away. They won’t take the history of the art practices presented away either. In that regard we’re not going to find an illiterate Moroccan mother telling stories here. And that Maurice, I find is a shame. That isn’t saying that an illiterate Moroccan mother is more authentic than the artists that are part of this exhibition or that her stories and telling of those stories aren’t staged in way one or another either. It does however say more about the networks of power that allow certain performances to take place and be centralized for our understanding of our societies. When William Rubin for example curated the exhibition “Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984, he unwittingly exemplified a pre-1989 commonly found curatorial practice of propagating neutrality where there was none to be found.

When I was thinking about the white cube at home I also realized how the intimacy between object and subject is at once denied and also glorified in such a setting. You stand, supposedly loose from other connections, in awe but also realize that you can’t actually connect to what you find awe inspiring. The basic premise is that you need a space in which you can connect to objects without having your surroundings pollute your reading of them. But is that even possible? As Nelson noted the presentation of these objects, as objects that you need to experience, is already canonical and thus (negatively) pollutes your reading of the works. I added the adverb because pollution can also be a good thing. It is through the pollution of our thoughts by others that we learn. A teacher of mine, Jami Weinstein, once said that just talking to one another is not just pollution through thoughts but also through the movement of air that enters your body. Me just standing here talking to you is already polluting us both in more ways than we are consciously aware of. Hopefully when I’m all done you’ll have experienced it as a positive pollution because right now I am. Right now I am an interconnected collective of different pollutants that have that have shaped me and have influenced each others’ permeability as concretely discernible and explicitly present and accounted for. I know, I know it’s a string of words and I saw some of your eyes get wider with every word I just said. But it’s just like this exhibition. It is a collection of different people that have been brought together to pollute the public’s reception of each other’s work just by being in the same exhibition as each other. And I for one question if you can still explicitly say that your reception of the art practices of one artist aren’t influenced by your access to the art practice of another. Thereby making you question whether there are two artists at all present and not one exhibition. I myself was asked to participate through a column but I took the opportunity to pollute the notion of what a column exactly looks like and how you can experience it. In that same sense Maria Hlavajova, whom I thanked at the beginning of this column, and Charles Esche, the director of the Van Abbemuseum, polluted the conventions of an exhibition with Once is Nothing. That was an exhibition in which they revisited the by Igor Zabel curated exhibition for the 2003 Venice Biennale for the Brussels Biennial 1, a mini mega-show that had 7 curators and it was based.

The political and economic realities behind the materialization of those exhibitions are of a different scale than OTS, but the statements made in those contexts can be read in the same vein. In both Once is Nothing and OTS the absence of the work is a play on repetition and the constant struggle to innovate exhibitions. Once Is Nothing however was part of a biennial that specifically dealt with modernist decline in the Hollocore, a term coined by Rem Koolhaas when talking about the Ruhr area, and in a sense was read as a bit sour by critics and journalists. By placing its emphasis on the surroundings of the exhibition and the building the exhibition was housed in, the former Post Sorting Center close to Zuidstation, the curators managed to present a staunch critique without a constructive conclusion. How to move on after this? Should all of the locations that were put to use again for the Brussels Biennial have been left empty as well emphasizing their Anglo Eurocentric modernist past? The biennial, which due to the limited available funds also placed the financial responsibility for the exhibitions by the curators and institutions that were invited to partake in the event, was held in 20th century staples of modernist thought: a bank, a metro station and a post sorting center. The argument of the Once is Nothing, as presented by critics and journalists, seems like one part of a twofold argument. Here it seems the curators reused the space they were in but didn’t connect it to an outcome that was conducive for a healthy forward looking argument. The space was exposed literally and figuratively. Now what?

OTS is also taking place in a former staple of the modernist era, a printer. How does a printer connect you ask? Well in a sense it’s pretty simple and up to this day still visible in our daily lives. At a performance a little while back I noticed and remarked to the audience that it seemed fairly odd and at the same was to be expected that the wrappers of the little cookies that you get with your tea or coffee had Orientalist images on them. I was performing at a debate on Dutch Orientalist practices and the way they shape, have shaped and will continue to shape Dutch society and thought patterns. And another fairly straightforward and simple connection that can be made is that the industrialization of the dissemination of words came about during the same period as colonialism and without a doubt facilitated the emergence and sustainability of Orientalism. That the Brussels Biennale, was confronted with a capitalist logic is more than ironic. That on the flyer for the openings of OTS all the sponsors and funding are horizontally presented is also ironic. Ironic in the sense that everything about this exhibition is about exposing the roles that we all play, but here the roles of each individual sponsor is tucked away under the safe heading of sponsor and fund. The specificity of their role is lacking. Is anybody here from the municipality? And are they wearing a badge like the rest of the crew? How to escape this network of compromise or of complicity?

Charless Esche notes that the compromised position of art institutions today as being “located within the economic hegemony of capitalism” is also “potentially their very advantage.” He goes on to say that because of their “’engaged autonomous’ relationship to capitalism” they can be utilized as tools for creating the possibility “to [think] differently or [imagine] things otherwise than they are.” What is however conceptually flawed in Esche’s argument is that things are a certain way and can only be thought of differently and not actually be different. He places different understandings of being over actual different states of being. It’s like epistemology over ontology. Relational aesthetics, coined by Nicolas Bourriaud to group a string of interventionist and socially engaged art practices that he was noticing during the late nineteen eighties and early to mid nineteen nineties, is also based on epistemological interventions. However relational aesthetics as institutional critique tries to circumvent this same conceptual flaw by enfolding epistemological interventions into actualized ontological changes. Artists were not only reconceptualizing what art and art institutions are and ain’t and their relationships to each other and to that which isn’t art or an art institution or to those who don’t consider themselves or are considered as artists. They were also implementing that discourse into their artistic practices. Cradle to grave institutional critique you could even call it. But as Claire Bishop points out this is only but a first step in the process. These relationships need to be evaluated as well because in the setting of art institutions their presentation as harmonious relationships and the realization of utopia’s is too shallow an understanding of the political workings of art and art institutions. Bishop points out that an understanding of the risks and the acknowledgement of the networks and boundaries in which one operates, what Irit Rogoff calls criticality, are missing. However Rogoff also envisions this criticality as part of a homogenous whole that obliterates the boundaries of the possible. But boundaries are impossible to ignore and to decry that boundaries should be thrown overboard is not an understanding of the working of these boundaries that make us understand who we are. These boundaries are part and parcel of the symbolic imaginary. Here I go doing it as well. Who are the we that I’m talking about? Am I talking about the Morrocan mother that I mentioned earlier? Am I talking about a neutrality that simply including her would imply?

As I said at the very beginning of this column, Opening: The Show is about restrictions. It’s about the boundaries that are thrown simply because we exist. And to exist, to develop, you are told that you must enclose a boundary to your past selves. You must restrict yourself to the here and now. You must learn to understand that tomorrow you can’t be the same person as you were today. Thereby ignoring that today the person that you are tomorrow will never exist. It is impossible for you to be the person that you thought you were going to be today tomorrow. I might be reading a bit too much into the show, but that is what I’m seeing as the message as well. As said I am part of the questions marks that I sensed that are placed throughout this exhibition. I was asked to come and focus more on the video works, but I was also told to make it a lecture performance. Thereby my own agency was acknowledged and also that I might do what I just did. I disrupted the order by not focusing on that aspect. I am part of the bits don’t quite fit in with the whole and I’m telling you that as I stand here. I’m not saying that I might not have stood here in another capacity. I mean I am a part of this world, the art world, through previous projects. And to do as if I am totally not part of it all would be disingenuous. I mean I’m not a complete fish out of water like an Antonio Negri doing a lecture on Spinoza at Kraaiennest in the Bijlmer for Thomas Hirschorn, but I do see myself as an other here. What I’m supposed to be bringing to you hasn’t been labeled as art but as a column. What I was supposed to make for the course that Maria Hlavajova and Marta Zarzycka gave was an academic paper. I’ve complied with neither order. Mouffe writes and I quote:

“Every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. Things could always be other and therefore every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities… What is, at a given moment, considered as the ‘natural’ order […] is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices; it is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity exterior to the practices that bring it into being.”

The questions are are you listening to me here or are you looking at me up there on the screen? What is going to stay with you longer, that which is accessible to you after this moment or this moment that is transient and will be forever but a memory captured? Am I here or am in my toilet being looked at by the white tiles? In other words the order that we see is only because we make the order and keep the order alive through our practices. The white cube exists because we make it that way. I am the constitutive other of art practice and simultaneously the constitutive other of academic thought production. But through me at this moment the agonistic relationship between both is emphasized. And it is this agonistic bond that I showcase to you. And I see that I’ve been taking too long with this talk because the two ladies in charge are looking at me almost like they’re about to scold me. I want to thank you for your time and I remind you to seek the spot within the installation that is not captured, the space whose function and whose place in the order of things allows dialogue.