Morbid Symptoms in the White Cube

29.7.13

Last June, the conference

Let’s reclaim public space through culture

was held, in which we collaborated; we invited
Yaiza Hernández
for the occasion, who prepared an extensive text that, for reasons beyond her control, did not have time to develop in her presentation. In a way, to compensate Yaiza and, above all, because the text seems very, very interesting to us, we publish it in full here on this blog:

 

Morbid Symptoms in the White Cube

Public spaces and cultural spaces
^[1]

 

I confess that the motto of this meeting stuck in my throat a bit: “Let’s reclaim public space through culture.” Not because it’s a bad plan, recovering common spaces is always good, even if you have to resort to culture in quotation marks to do so. It stuck in my throat because it harmonizes too well with the rhetoric that many institutions have mobilized during the last decades to do just the opposite. “Culture” is institutionally understood not as “a whole way of life” in the sense that Raymond Williams gave it, but as something more select, restricted and, therefore, “valuable”, something that deserves its own space (theirs, that of their own, not that of everyone, not a “public” space in a strong, not merely state sense). If we are going to claim that culture (in this sense as partial as it is abstract) can be a, or even the most effective element in procuring this public space, we will do well to pay attention to the multitude of occasions in which this claim has turned out to be spurious. Not to go very far, let’s think about the last three decades, in which we have seen the number of museums, auditoriums, art centers or even “cities” of culture in the Spanish state increase exponentially.

To quickly account for what happened in this expansionist era, I will focus on an example that is no less representative for being biographical. When in 1991 I left Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the place where I grew up, the city––today with just over 200,000 inhabitants––was already quite well supplied with cultural spaces: an exhibition hall, archive, library and film library of the government (La Casa de la Cultura); the Photography Center of the Cabildo, two exhibition halls of the City Council (La Recova and Los Lavadores), a space for workshops (in the Parque Viera y Clavijo), a library, a museum of Fine Arts and a theater-auditorium (Guimerá) also municipal. There were also a handful of private galleries (Leyendecker being the most prominent), several cinemas (the one of the Yaiza Borges collective, of which my parents were part, had closed a few years before) and some privately funded halls (COAC, CajaCanarias, Círculo de Bellas Artes…). I’m sure I’m forgetting something.

As a teenager, I visited these spaces on many occasions. In almost all of them, the programming was chaotic enough that you never knew what you were going to find, one day it was Italian neo-avant-garde, the next day breadcrumb figurines from a day center. What the so-called “cultural sector” demanded––and I as a teenager felt very much a part of the cultural sector––was a greater professionalization of those spaces (death to breadcrumbs!), more artistic “criteria”, fewer nephews of politicians in charge. We secretly demanded that it be people “like us” who decided the programming, appealing to what we speculated should happen in serious cities. I have often thought back to that model that housed cross-stitch paintings and Herzog’s cinema under the same roof, the one that then made the “experts” despair but now returns as a second nature through programming-marketing techniques designed to attract “a whole way of life” back to the museum (and with special emphasis on that part of life that is occupied with consuming).

The response to these demands for more professionalization and programming with more criteria was intended to be resolved––like almost everything in Spain at that time––with a cement mixer.^[2]

The combination of the construction fever with that of regional and urban “promotion” left us on the verge of the crisis with one of the highest densities of infrastructures dedicated to art in all of Europe. Santa Cruz was left with an auditorium and a fairground by the ubiquitous (and unforgivable) Calatrava and a huge museum, the Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (or TEA) designed by the super-Swiss Herzog and De Meuron (buildings whose millionaire cost remains in semi-darkness). On the architects’ website, the TEA is described as “a new and vital space for people of all generations with various interests”, they tell us that “access to the center will be possible from all sides” and that “a new public path will cut diagonally through the building complex connecting the top of the Puente Serrador with the mouth of the Barranco de Santos”. ^[3]

 

In practice, the TEA brings together very few people. Beyond those who go to the library (free access and major functional problems) or to eat in its H&dM design restaurant, there is hardly ever a soul. Access is free as long as the entrance fee is paid. It is true that there is a path that crosses the museum diagonally and is passable without paying. Before there was also a path, surely less attractive to many people, populated by infra-housing and bars of ill repute. During the interval that preceded the construction of the TEA, the land they left was taken by a spontaneous parking attendant with great chromatic sensitivity who, personally, seemed to me to be the most fabulous thing in the city.

 

The path that crosses the TEA today is less public than that vacant land it replaced. A place watched over by cameras and security guards, where it is not possible to spend the night or demonstrate, where meeting in the open air––despite the island’s “eternal spring”––would not be practicable. A place that is better described according to that euphemism that has come to describe the new urban normality of control societies: “semi-public” spaces. On one side of the TEA is Cabo-Llanos, optimistically labeled the “golden mile” of Santa Cruz, a neighborhood born on the displacement of fishing populations when in the seventies it served as an expansion of the city and where the new construction area of “high luxury” homes is now located (some of which were left unfinished). On the other side is the constellation of the streets Bravo Murillo, La Noria and Miraflores, a port and market neighborhood where prostitution and dealing tended to be concentrated, now converted into a leisure area with buildings once reviled and today treated as a “historical and heritage center”. This story of urban development and gentrification making its way thanks to “culture” is already familiar enough not to have to give more account of it here. But it was worth remembering to be cautious before affirming that culture serves to reclaim public spaces. In our recent memory, on the contrary, culture has functioned as a veil behind which new enclosures and dispossession were hidden. ^[4]

 

Good practices

While in general there was a mixture of indifference and perplexity at the proliferation of artistic centers of postcard architecture, the cultural sector was pleased. Everyone deserved to have access to professionalized and criteria-based culture, but also, without anyone having demanded it, it was now necessary to have brand new buildings, well-fed teams and Vitra™ chairs. The price to pay for so much polished cement at our feet was a degree of political interference with a certain folkloric grace (Consuelo Císcar’s “modern” hair, the Murcian pavilion at the Venice Biennale), but no less criminal for that, also demanding––and often obtaining––a disheartening passivity and connivance. A persistent reminder that a long-running dictatorship does not go away without leaving a mark.

 

 

The most articulated sectoral response to this situation was the elaboration of what became known as the “Manual of Good Practices”, a deontological document of a non-normative nature whose greatest achievement was the public opening of calls for the selection of directors in some institutions instead of the designation of “trusted positions” that had been customary. An important victory against nepotism, but somewhat pyrrhic if we remember that the document was signed at the beginning of 2007. ^[5]

Its reading reveals an almost tragic blindness regarding the conditions of the moment. Thus, for example, it is requested that an artistic project be elaborated taking into account the opinion of “experts and interlocutors from the art world” before sizing the requirements of the new building. Although this request sounded sensible, it also served to reinforce the idea that new buildings were necessary (“a structural element of great importance is… an architectural equipment that possesses the appropriate physical, spatial and technological characteristics”). These would serve, on the one hand, to give way to “the attraction of cultural tourism, the rehabilitation of degraded urban environments, the external projection of the locality/autonomy/state, etc.” according to the wishes of politicians, and on the other, to develop an “artistic project”, according to the wishes of the “sector”. This complicity with urban depredation policies was granted in exchange for nothing, since almost no building would require such a project. ^[6]

With a similar lack of tempo, the document also advocates for the holding of competitive examinations for all job positions except those of director, despite the fact that competitive examinations were about to go down in history to give way to mini-jobs. The truth is that it thus reaffirmed an absurd hierarchy already de facto established that exaggerated the difference between a staff of civil servants (unfairly understood as mere executors of a function) and a (supposedly the only) thinking director in charge.
^[7]
Faced with the danger of the politician who pursues daily intimacy, accountability according to this Manual would be reduced to “informing once a year of the director’s plans”. I do not doubt that the intentions of its signatories were honest, but the document revealed––perhaps unintentionally––a desire to ensure for their guild the same capacity to function “without interference” that politicians enjoyed: total delegation.
^[8]
This would also soon cease to seem acceptable.

As we will see later, while in Spain they were trying to refine the terms of a state financing about to collapse, at the European level an Anglo-American model of cultural governance based on the systematic treatment of culture as a cultural industry fundamentally concerned with generating new artificial markets was gaining ground.
^[9]
The coexistence of both models helped to ensure that, on occasions, sectoral claims seemed contradictory or even incompatible. Thus, for example, in the same document (the “Document of Measures to Support the Art Sector” of 2011) a patronage law “with the maximum tax deductions” was claimed, offering as a counterpart six commitments, all of them aimed at promoting “national cultural production”.
^[10]
But in addition, said document contained the following phrase that left one foot behind: “Culture is often used as an element that underpins the political discourse without the declarations being accompanied by the necessary budgetary generosity” a declaration that would almost seem to formally accept the quid pro quo of economic solvency for electoral propaganda while presenting a merely quantitative objection.

Despite this, it was the patronage law that was most prioritized in the media. Instead of opposing the reconversion into industry that they had around the corner, the “sector” was paving the way for it, counting on the support of powerful lobbies from the financial world.
^[11]
This could be attributed more to an inability to get an adequate idea of the present than to a conscious effort to change the model (the naive premise was that the generous state subsidy would survive the introduction of tax incentives for patronage). But even so, it is difficult not to see in it the sign of a generalized political apathy disguised as a pseudo-union claim. Only a little curiosity would have been enough to discover which way the wind was blowing. ^[12]

Advancing in that direction was digging one’s own grave, the bulk of art professionals in Spain had not acquired the commercial (or even administrative) know-how that this new model demanded. Not for lack of capacity, but for lack of experience, since these skills were never required of them.
^[13]
It is undeniable that politicians destroyed the potential of many projects (both the TEA and the IVAM would suffer that fate), but the little battle between the “autonomy” of the managers and the desires of the politicians to become curators was inflated in the guild imagination until it acquired epic dimensions that it never reached. The real tensions between political leaders and management positions were always resolved with the elimination (often lightning) of the latter. A sustained and sectoral tension would not have been viable even. In the first place, despite the halo of singularity with which they surround themselves, the main characteristic of the director of a museum of contemporary art consists in being (for better or for worse) infinitely replaceable: the aspirants to the profession massively exceed the existing positions. On the other hand, the high salaries of the managers in relation to the workers of their teams (and sometimes also with respect to their European colleagues) served as an effective measure of appeasement and breakdown of solidarities.

The focus on the problem of political interference (which, although residual, was no less real) had served to hide a tacit agreement between the managers and the political class thanks to which many cultural spaces were able to function for years without worrying about the things that kept other colleagues in other countries awake at night: competing for fundraising, organizing parties to beg patrons, increasing income streams, designing marketing strategies, filling the halls, attracting “minority audiences”… we could say that these institutions functioned as infra-administered spaces. Their only unappealable obligations were often reduced to pleasing the local press (in turn heavily dependent on public subsidies) and providing the councilor on duty with enough opportunities to be photographed surrounded by “culture”. ^[14]

The possibility of not worrying about the size of the audience undoubtedly allowed for an enviable programmatic margin. In reality, as long as a preventive distance was maintained from the actions of the patrons (avoiding talking about local/regional/state politics as the case may be), it was possible to do almost anything. Thus, it was infinitely easier to talk about global anti-capitalist struggles than about municipal urban plans.
^[15]
Some people with good judgment were able to design exquisite programs that in other places would surely have been dismissed for their lack of “appeal.” Unfortunately, the “judgment” card was played too easily to comfortably stay among “our own,” to reduce the ghost of the “public” to the ghost of the “sector,” a gesture that was justified by artificially narrowing the distance that separated the empty rooms from “selling out to the spectacle.” The potential of the expansionist era resided in the possibility of not renouncing either critical programming or the contrasting or even shaping of these with a broad, constitutively contradictory, agonistic, and uncontainable public. But except in saved occasions it remained in that, in potential. The idea of the “public” as a docile herd, an amorphous mass abandoned to seduction, would endure even when it was imagined singularized as a set of “multiple minorities.” ^[16]

It is difficult to understand why the belief in one’s own program was not united with some proselytizing impulse, but the desire to share does not find much room when opacity becomes the norm. Obscurantism in Spanish artistic institutions––combined with something of Versailles paranoia––has not only operated outwards, it has also roamed freely internally. As I have suggested, intra-institutionally it has been used, on the one hand, to be able to make decisions without having to give a detailed account of them to those who intended to interfere unduly, on the other, to perpetuate the operative fantasy that the work of those at the top was valuable enough to justify the very steep salary scale. More or less the same uses that opacity had at the external level.

 

Morbid symptoms

I have serious problems putting titles on things and this one that has come out now is not great either, but the much-quoted phrase of Gramsci that I paraphrase seems opportune to me. Namely: “the crisis consists in that the old is dying and the new fails to be born, in this interregnum a whole series of morbid symptoms arise.”
^[17]
Gramsci understood crises not as an exceptional phenomenon, but as a continuous process inherent to the capitalist method of production that serves as its engine. That is, the crisis should not be the occasion to become apocalyptic, but to better recognize the system through its moments of fracture and recomposition. But despite the centrality that he grants it, Gramsci does not describe the “crisis in itself,” only multiple crises of one type or another. The little phrase in question refers to a “crisis of authority,” that which appears at that moment in which the ruling class has lost consensus. It no longer leads, because no one thinks that it marks the way forward, but despite this it continues to hold power. It goes without saying that the phrase is timely in a broader sense, but it comes here to mention a smaller “crisis of authority,” the one that concerns the institutional guardians of contemporary art in the Spanish state. And let us also remember that Gramsci linked this crisis to the problem of the “younger generation,” that to which only the coercion of the dying separates it from hegemony.

In the scene of this interregnum, the “cultural sector”––guilty or complicit in particularly spectacular exuberances and excesses––appears as the ideal, deserved, and necessary recipient of austerity policies.
^[18]
This logic has permeated even (or even particularly) among cultural workers. Socializing with them nowadays is exposing yourself to hearing things like “this will be good to start doing things differently,” or “the important thing is to generate interesting projects and not stop doing things because there is no money.” The do-it-yourself is exhibited as a sign of an almost-punk independence despite how much its intimate ties with the positivism of neoliberal “if you want, you can” have already demonstrated. Thus, based on voluntarist imagination, a parallel universe is constructed where the crisis is nothing more than a resource to sift out the parasites of the system and ensure a greater and more effective meritocracy. Ayn Rand for desperate optimists.

Its moment of truth lies in that what comes after (not after the crisis, merely “after”) will be the moment of projects made “with more love than resources” and that the managers who do not learn to do things “differently” will be replaced. Its moment of patheticness is thinking that it will always be the others who do not gather “merits,” those who are expendable, those who have to self-exploit to pretend that they are still alive: magical thinking in a cultural sector with an industrial reserve army of enormous dimensions. Even so, many of those who already understand the terms of what is to come, launch into a passionate accelerationism on everything that refuses to disappear quickly enough. “Let the drum of this vital lottery spin again, let’s see if this time I get something.”
^[19]
Everything seems to point to that younger generation being right. That the dying must hurry to disappear and give way to a new hegemony. But not everything that is to come brings guarantees of improving the present. And in any case, it makes no sense to fight for the sun to come out.

 

The sector, the criterion, the public

This text in itself begins to sound morbid, a forensic analysis of dying things and the living dead. If it were true that nothing justifies writing about something that is not loved or admired, it would even begin to sound illegitimate. That “cultural sector” Hasn’t it done anything good, anything admirable or kind, during the last twenty years? I think the question is idle: the “cultural sector” does not exist. The idea that there is a thing there, within reach, called “culture” is as precarious as it is persistent. But imagining it like this, static and available (although not delimitable) is tremendously convenient to safeguard both traditional museums and the ineffable art market from scrutiny.
^[20]
Only in this way, assuming that its object is already given, that it is not in dispute, is it possible to conceive of a class of professionals who deal with its production, promotion and care and a class of people––the “cultured”––who are distinguished by their enjoyment. The ideological fantasy of the cultural sector is that of a community established from a shared criterion and the consensus that it produces and reaffirms. Its civilizing mission, the cultivation of the masses, would involve “reviving” an innate capacity to judge that functions as a mark of humanity (or lack thereof) but that sometimes requires additional training. It doesn’t matter if we call it “refining taste” or “deliberative process”, in both cases it is about exercising ourselves to arrive at the appropriate sentence, the one that has already been dictated in advance.

The history of a universal community that recognizes itself as such around “the best that has been thought and said” is a powerful but tricky story. Communities (like public spaces) are not forged only by works of art and universalism a priori is the best weapon of mass exclusion that we have invented. The “sector” as an operator and ideal recipient of the cultural apparatus, serves to preserve the idea of community while denying it de facto. The “criterion”, its safeguard, is naturalized and invisibilized, remaining conveniently abstract and elusive.

But I’m not telling anything new, we’ve been saying these things about culture for at least half a century.
^[21]
Is more of the same needed now, here? This is another of the peculiarities of the cultural landscape in the Spanish state. The legitimizing rhetoric with which it has been wrapped has survived without major modifications for an unusual time,
^[22]
resisting more general tonics in other countries in its environment where it has had to adapt to the demands not only of the “critique of ideology”, but of the market. Now, as if we were coming out of a long lethargy, we become aware of the need for “updating”. And this updating is repeatedly presented as a reward for a single possible protocol, the one that involves putting “the public” (those who are not from the sector, those without discernible criteria), at the center of everything. An exercise that requires subjecting “the public” to the same exercise of hypostatization to which “culture” had previously been subjected. ^[23]

For this, as we saw before, there is a formula that requires only a little inertia, one more turn of the screw towards the construction of a cultural leisure market where the public is always right. A model that replaces the mystification of the presupposed value of culture in pursuit of its partisan use, with that of the fictitious capital that it supposedly mobilizes; where the state is partially replaced by corporate-patrons in accordance with the sign of the times. To defend its viability, it is enough to appeal to macro-institutions such as the Tate, which was able to obtain in the period 2011-2012 revenues of 113 million pounds of which “only” 32.8 m. had been contributed by the state. An army of fundraisers and an aggressive commercial strategy do the rest (26.7 m. come from their commercial activities).
^[24]
By all accounts, the model of the “cultural industry” (already fully integrated into the European policy) would seem to move away from any commitment to the “recovery of public space” that was being claimed in this meeting.
^[25]

But things are not so simple, the idea of public space is part of the marketing mix of the new museums and here the appeal to the divine providence of the market also seems to solve everything. Faced with the traditional indifference that our institutions have shown towards the public, these others dedicate an enormous amount of energy to attracting it. The public in this scenario is, without a doubt, multiple and tremendously complex, singularized through the overwhelming combination of those 440 data elements that the Mosaic™ system allows for the classification of consumers, processed through complex CRMs
^[26]
… a quantitative logic that allows each “public profile” to be given what, according to calculations, it demands. But at least putatively, the interest is not only commercial. Like large corporations, these institutions are also endowed with corporate responsibility (like a soul, but without consequences) and cheerfully handle pseudo-concepts such as “inclusivity”, “cultural outreach“, “social impact”… the newspeak of post-politics.
^[27]
In Spain there is an institution that has been more responsible than any other for advancing this attitude: the Fundación La Caixa. In its annual calls for aid to “Art for Social Improvement” they tell us:

The plastic arts, music, theater, dance or literature can be tools that go beyond their specifically artistic dimension. For this reason, in the Obra Social “la Caixa” we are calling for aid for projects of cultural entities and artists that favor the use of art and culture as instruments of intervention and social transformation.

Priority lines of action:

1. Promote activities linked to the plastic arts, photography, music, literature and the performing arts as a resource for personal development and social inclusion.

2. Encourage the active role of the participating groups and the professionals of the world of culture in activities of a social nature.^[28]

In just a few lines we find a subtle but eloquent shift from the idea of “transformation” to that of “inclusion”. By singularizing “exclusion” as an exceptional problem restricted to particular people or groups, the false image of a society is projected in which access to basic goods, services and social ties is guaranteed for the majority, making “inclusion” the only objective of any intervention and thus making irrelevant any attempt at that broader “transformation” to which it alludes. It is possible to think of the agenda of “social inclusion” in the subsidy policies of the arts, as an enormous exercise of redefining a problem––the radically unequal distribution of income––in terms of another––equal access to (certain) cultural resources; its meliorative rhetoric leaves intact the deep reasons for what it intends to improve.

But now I’m already going from morbidity to necrophilia, so I’ll try to conclude by venturing a modest proposition. Culture, Raymond Williams told us at the beginning of the text, is ordinary, part of an indissoluble social process, not a derivation, distillation, or “expression” of it: culture is “a whole way of life”. It would not be appropriate to minimize what this expression has of problematic. As E.P. Thompson made sure to remind him, there is little to celebrate in “a whole way of life” that turns out to be nothing more than a capitalist way of life.
^[29]
Beyond that, if culture encompasses a whole way of life, it will end up coinciding with another equally problematic term, society. The promise then that culture could serve to deny a present society in the name of another to come, is more difficult to imagine. Thompson’s criticisms are fair, Williams never quite clarified himself with culture, trying to fit that total-culture with the tradition of that other “minority culture” that he had inherited in Cambridge.
^[30]
At the end of his life he would even confess “I don’t even know how many times I have wished I had never heard the damn word”.
^[31]

However, it left us some clues that are still useful. Only a common culture can avoid being a document of barbarism at the same time. And this culture will never be the result of a paternalistic spirit, based on diffusion from a few to the masses (it is not about “getting” culture to people, nor is it about waiting for the people to “catch up” with the avant-garde). If culture is common, the community that shares it cannot have been forged on the basis of providing cultural services, much less on the basis of individual opportunities (to be creative or “feel” creativity). Williams flatly rejects these ideas and offers us another in return, that of “solidarity”.
^[32]
Williams derived his idea of solidarity (surely thanks to romantic rose-tinted glasses) from an intrinsic creativity in the socialized work of the working class, a solidarity that had nothing to do with sharing certain experiences (visiting museums, for example) or a social position, but with a complex and continuous process of collective collaboration, a process that was more about struggle than celebration. A process that, on the other hand, was always threatened by its defensive character, always one step away from turning the common into another machine of exclusion. But even so, Williams’ idea maintains its strength. Culture is not the vademecum of everything that “must be known”, but rather it is the awareness that there is much to learn (learning to live together, to begin with). If we do not want to renounce the emancipatory potential that at some point we wanted to give it (and let us remember that if we do, all that will be left behind will be a lot of junk), perhaps it is a matter of refining our critical apparatus. Instead of starting from a pre-ordered canon that we test based on its capacity to attract us, entertain us or awaken our aesthetic or “critical” faculties, perhaps we should invert the motto of this meeting. Perhaps it is not so much a question of pretending that it is an already given “culture” that allows us to recover the public space, but rather we should think that only where we recognize the solidary construction of a common space can we properly speak of culture.

---

1 This text was prepared for presentation during the conference “Ens Toca! Recuperem l’espai Públic a través de la Cultura” organized by the association Amics de l’Ateneu Santboià in collaboration with the Trans Europe Halles network from June 13 to 15, 2013. I thank the organization and La Fundició for thinking of me. During the conference, space availability problems meant that what was going to be an hour-long talk was reduced to just over 15 minutes. My own time problems have prevented me from polishing it beyond this provisional form, intended to be heard rather than read; it speaks in general of realities that, on a particular level, have many more nuances.