On Johan van Geluwe’s The Museum of Museums in BE-PART, Waregem (September-October 2009)
Celebrating its five-year anniversary, the centre for contemporary art BE-PART exhibits The Museum of Museums, the lifework of local-born conceptual artist Johan van Geluwe. The artist’s concept represents a series of fictive institutions that claim their ability to define what is art and what is not, through the authority of the stamp. Referring to the work of artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Joseph Kosuth and Michael Asher, Van Geluwe symbolically reveals the cultural power exercised through the aesthetic judgements of museums, curators, gallery holders and critics. These types of practices, commonly known as institutional critique, have however evolved from the museum-fleeing of the Alternative Space Movement in the 1960s into highly self-reflexive strategies. Nowadays, artists commenting on the institution question the dual activity of criticising the same cultural industry in which they consciously partake – e.g. the work of Andrea Fraser and Daniel Buren. BE-PART seems not to be concerned with this evolution, programming an artist that resides in an uninspired and outdated generalisation towards institutional mechanisms. The artist and the institution thus forbear both to address the paradoxical condition of institutionalising institutional critique and, more importantly, to reflect on shifts within the cultural industry. These shifts have nonetheless radically transformed the public manifestation of art. Over the last decade, the space of the gallery, the fair and the magazine have all been endowed with an equivalent institutional authority, once solely ascribed to the conventional museum.
Ironically, BE-PART is itself living proof of these altered institutional structures. Since the official recognition and grants for the new category ‘Centres for Visual Art’ by the Flemish government in 2001, the Flemish cultural infrastructure has vastly expanded with local initiatives for contemporary art, all claiming the same competence as the decisive players in the artistic field. Despite the fashionable credo that a ‘rich cultural landscape’ actively promotes the public’s participation in cultural activity – hence the name BE-PART – a vision on the role these newbies need to play within the cultural structure is still lacking. The result is a proliferation of provincial initiatives that act both as museum and artist-in-residence production space, both as platform for beginning artists and monographic retrospectives, or that serve both local and international interests. In the case of BE-PART, juxtaposing the 2004 opening exhibition Schöner Wohnen curated by Moritz Küng with the blunt 2009 persiflage Schöner Wohnen II by Van Geluwe epitomises this institutional duality. Whereas the former ambitiously investigated the ornamental fascination within the international art scene and the ‘villa-condition’ under which the art centre operates, the latter refuses any agenda but to serve the outdated mockery of a local artist. As the Van Geluwe retrospective publicly lays bare the institutional schizophrenia, BE-PART deprives itself of the cultural credibility it once had attained.
The Museum of Museums raises questions on the actual raison d’être of these types of provincial authorities in contemporary art. Whether a local Kunsthalle, a national museum or an other art institution, to have cultural authority can be no means to escape from institutional self-reflexivity and responsibility. For without lucid institutional voices, every worthless piece of kitsch – as the Van Geluwe retrospective painfully exemplifies – is worthy of being ‘stamped’ as art.
Stefaan Vervoort
- Johan van Geluwe, The Museum of Museums, BE-PART, Waregem (2009), installation view
- Johan van Geluwe, Schöner Wöhnen II, BE-PART, Waregem (2009), installation view
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