中文The truth matters – why questions need to be asked
(about HKADC and M+’s collaboration in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013)
On June 22, 2012, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and M+ announced their collaboration and the selection of artist at the 55th Venice Biennale to take place in 2013. Hong Kong’s participation in the oldest visual art biennale in the world is not new, but the fact that the artist was selected by invitation rather than open competition marked a major policy change.
There could be many good reasons for supporting a policy change. Consider the simple but crucial fact about how much time artists and curators had to prepare for the exhibition in the past. In 2009, artist Tozer Pak was formally notified that he was selected only three months before the exhibition. Last year, HKADC called off the application and selection for artists in response to a complaint that questioned the legality of the application procedure. A second round of application was launched. The artist and curators were announced five months before the opening of the biennale (Note 1). If better conditions of production, communication and presentation of the art are long awaited, why is the recent policy change greeted not only by agreement, but also dissent?
1 Legitimacy, Reasoning
The collaboration of HKADC and M+ in the biennale is puzzling for several reasons. First, it institutes a different way of distributing the right of participation in the biennale. The former open call was principled on equal right of participation. The new one is principled on commission and invitation. Both policies involve discrimination because selection is involved. Both policies pass value judgment on what art should be honored. How we choose which one (or neither, or which other one) to adopt must be discussed and deliberated openly and in public. There are many ways of doing this, and our choices could be very different depending on the purpose of presenting artists in the biennale. All these could have contributed to a public culture that seeks the truth and debates about values by reason. But none of these have been made room for.
The policy change was major in another way. Two public institutions on the governmental level work together for the first time, instituting a new infrastructure for the presentation of art from Hong Kong internationally. Does this entail a different organization of the public sector devoted to the Venice Biennale or other biennales? How would this new infrastructure relate to the existing topography of museums that also work in the field of contemporary art and overseas projects? What are the implications on the institutions’ future responsibilities in various aspects of art development in Hong Kong? Not only are these serious questions about values that the public has the right to ask and the duty to understand, but they could also have contributed to deliberations about our ideals on art and culture, and in the longer run, to building a quality audience that is receptive to the unresolved debates that art itself often raises. Again, no room has been made for the practice of this kind of civic freedom. A whole spectrum of possibilities for the communication of art and for the public to make meaning of it is reduced and trivialized into what HKADC calls an “experiment” that will be reviewed after the presentation (Note 2). By not giving information, the institutions are fostering the habit of governing without those being governed in mind. By not giving information, they are depriving the right of the art to become socially relevant to the public, which constitutes a violation of their mandate as public institutions. By not fostering discussion, they are promoting the habit of mind that art is not for all, but for a privileged few. The original purposes and responsibilities of public institutions to research and analyze the need for the change of policy, to compare and contrast options, to define, situate and evaluate our current state, to devise, propose, articulate, and explain the new policy, and to argue for it persuasively in public, are dissolved.
To be sure, the public is very much on the Executive Director of M+ Lars Nittve’s mind. In his public presentation on April 11, 2012, he says M+ has a “very strong public service ethos”. The collaboration with HKADC seems to suggest that M+ seeks “public service” in the HKADC, rather than progressively, seriously, rigorously, and with ingenuity in a wide spectrum of ways to engage with the people of Hong Kong. If M+ is a different kind of institution, one that does not only make exhibitions and events or showcase artworks, but, with an independence of mind, gives compelling reasons for the intellectual contexts in which it works, to accept what seems to be an obscure proposal by HKADC seems unnecessary, even unwise. What might have informed this choice made by a free agent?
2 Freedom, Responsibility
Freedom may not be our daily vocabulary, but if we stop and pause, we would appreciate all kinds of basic freedom that constitute our lives. We value self determination – the freedom of making choices for ourselves about our lives, of expressing our heritage and creating meanings for society and culture. We value possibilities that develop our capacities and those that lead us to new ones. We value being recognized as free and equal human beings. These fundamental freedoms give moral guidance to our lives. They tell us what is a life well lived. These freedoms make sense only when there is mutual recognition of the same freedoms that others also enjoy: we value freedom insofar as there is equality of freedom for everyone. This reciprocal recognition is precisely where and how our freedom is limited – not by private interests but by a shared sense of the public good. With rights come duties, which include the duty to listen to others, to understand difference even though we cannot embrace it, to be humble in face of compelling arguments that invalidate our beliefs etc. When we exercise this kind of freedom that carries moral force, we are no longer guided by intuition. We are transformed by our regard of the public good, which compels us to take responsibility for our own and others’ lives, just as others do for us.
In response to members of the public exercising their right and duty to know about the change of policy on the biennale, M+ coins the importance of “curatorial freedom” in that the selection of artist should not be done by “vote, committee, and under pressure.” I find this claim unconvincing for the following reasons. When curatorial freedom is set up to be in an oppositional relation to the public, it becomes a superior kind of freedom that is more worthy of upholding than those kinds of freedoms that the public enjoy as fundamental rights. I am not sure if this is a possible argument, and I am not sure if we start measuring one kind of freedom against the other that we are still talking about freedom and not privileges. I do support curatorial freedom for other reasons.
Curatorial freedom expresses the same kinds of freedom that all humans enjoy. When we are free from coercion and domination (which could be physical, like having a gun pointed at the curator, or social, political, and symbolic, like having to take up or give up on holding certain opinions for the threat of retribution or political persecution), we can reason independently and seek out the truth. In curating, this means seeking out the truth for art. Curatorial freedom is also derived from the same kinds of freedom that all humans enjoy. As an analogy, take editorial freedom that news organizations uphold. Journalists and editors safeguard editorial freedom not out of their own interests, nor the perception that their profession is superior and worthy of privileges. Rather, they do so out of the recognition of the equal right to access information that every member of the public enjoys. Like editorial freedom, curatorial freedom is also limited by that which delegates power to the curation in the first place – the common good. Only then, when we acknowledge the limits of freedom, that it can acquire moral force. Otherwise, freedom is no different from intuition. To say that curatorial freedom is the expression of the same kind of fundamental freedom is not to say there can be no distinction between good and bad art. When there is curatorial freedom, independence of mind is cultivated. It welcomes and learns from criticism and challenges. It seeks out for truth rather than authority or glory hidden behind fortresses.
What could curating freely mean in the context of a public institution? Curating is a kind of valuing. Many aspects of our lives are valued by the market today by price tags. Curating values art not by giving it a price tag – if artists and artworks are mere commodities, if the free market is all that comes into determining the value of art, really, there is no need for the trouble to even talk about curation. Curating values art by bringing knowledge to it, contextualizing it, by way of selection, presentation and articulation. In doing so, it sets up different, even competing ways of valuing art from the market. It is through learning about and discussing these differences that our public life (our life of living together) and the public life of art are enriched. When curating exercises this freedom of expression, the curation becomes political not because it serves particular partisan interests, but because it exercises the same freedom that other members of the society does. It participates in and enriches a public life that belongs to all – equally, reciprocally, and freely. It is this relation between each other in a civil society that curation is political: good curation of art is integral to the long-term infrastructure of civic and public life. It is integral to the idea of what makes a good life. It describes the quality of relation between people in a society. Good curation takes good care of this universal and humanistic value of art – its autonomy and controversy. This is why no good curation is single-minded, for no art is single-minded as a human endeavor. The ability to deal with complexity, which means plaited together, interwoven, or connected together in Latin, is precisely a demonstration of the freedom to act responsibly with regard of others, be they physically present or not. It is to acknowledge freedom alongside determination, and independence along side dependence.
If curation gives the works a life, a context, a way of alignment or contest, an intellectual rigor, then, curatorial freedom is relevant to all. If the valuing is also based upon sound reasoning that makes the honor worthy, its source unquestionably legitimate, artists, just as anyone else in our society, would benefit from the civic function of art. Without this civic function, any “world class” curation could offer nothing but the same empty slogan that local property advertisements circulate.
The museum today faces an immense and difficult task. Its traditional role as arbitrator of taste is dwindling. Its powerful competitors are the media that is always faster and more far-reaching with visual language with the help of the market. To stand, the museum needs a kind of closure, which, as Groys argues, is the precondition for openness. This closure is attained through knowledge and experience, as much as through care and sensitivity. Any closure sets up an inside and an outside, but the two sides do not have to be disconnected, hierarchical or oppressive. Above all, the need for intellectual closure should not be conflated with an isolationist and protectionist policy that closes the institution off from the inherently open-ended nature of any humanistic endeavor – the ambiguity of knowledge, the open debate, the hospitality and humility that continue to shape our shared experiences.
No world-class institution operates in a vacuum. No world-class curator works in the air. Our institutions and our many more curators to come will not be the exception. Their practices may be controversial; they may be in unsafe positions. They may do things we cannot embrace. But we should be sought after to lend support, not because we need any more heroes or martyrs, but for showing civil courage in their search for truth. There is a lot we are all responsible for in changing things for the better.
Postscript (Note 3)
Since the announcement in June last year, I have had a few observations to add here.
1. Regarding how to make of, name, define, or contextualize what happened
On October 3, 2012, HKADC distributed a public statement (Note 4) in hard copies before the beginning of a public forum on the incident (Note 5). In the statement, HKADC says, “Past exhibitions [in the Venice Biennale] were organized by different curatorial teams, hence there was no stable work team that passed on the experience.” This became their reason for having to work with M+. I find it problematic that HKADC regards appointing one curatorial team as an easy solution to “passing on” experience that comprises different kinds of knowledge and skills that around an occasion that has never been analyzed and evaluated in terms of the overall, strategic development of art in Hong Kong. HKADC’s claim also shows how unclear it is on the kind of conditions that make a wholistic process of “passing the experience on” – rather than one that focuses only on curation – possible. It also reveals how HKADC has not been performing well in their own duties in precisely passing on the Venice experience (eg. archiving, publicity, documentation, and research). Meantime, M+ emphasized that they were invited, and were passive. I have also heard art practitioners spoke of M+ as a victim of this incident. I do not agree, for M+ as a public institution has its own mandate. It ought to have an understanding of its legitimacy and the reason for its mandate. While M+ committed to collaborating with HKADC, where there was public grievances, it quickly kept a distance from its collaborator. This shows how little M+ understands, even cares for, the mandate and responsibilities of his collaborator HKADC in the development of art in Hong Kong. What does this kind of uninformed collaboration tell us about M+’s commitment to the overall art development in Hong Kong? Being responsibility for the public is an undertaking that concerns not only the individual – otherwise it becomes a kind of heroism. Being responsibility for the public is an undertaking that cannot be monopolized by one institution in isolation from the others – otherwise it becomes a slanted policy.
2. Whose matter is this – between professionals and the public
In a study on the emergence of professional institutions in the US and Europe during the 19th century, Louis Menand made the point that when institutions propose a set of professional standards, a “redistribution of certain social values” is involved. “The autonomous individual," he says, "is now figured as less free than the person who operates as the extension of an organization – less free because less secure in his sense of identity, less likely to get done what he wants done, less able to hold his course in the winds of competing interests.” (Note 6) I propose it is precisely because there is a public relevance and aspect to the professional, any public institution that participates in setting up professional standards should be doing so as a process of setting up ethical practices and social values. This is the publicness of the professional, and the responsibility of the professional to produce meaning for the public. This is what I mean by the professional being doubly accountable. In this case, both public institutions claim that not all of their work can be "made public”. This shows how crude and reduced their understanding of the idea of the public is. I would like to reiterate that this is not a matter of "procedure" within an institution, but a deliberation of principles. It is a deliberation on what is fair and just. This debate is of course challenging, but this is also the source of its meaning and force of the idea of the public. Hong Kong is yet to institute a Public Archives Law. This will be one of the directions we could work for so that the mandate of public institutions, and what they are responsible for and legitimated by becomes clear to the public.
Post Postscript – Ought we not still be thinking today…
My learning in this incident and the problematics arising from it continues with the idea of “parochial” coined by Kevin Kwong in the South China Morning Post (Oct 7, 2012). I find it problematic that the writer assumes that the so-called parochial is a barrier and burden to a “common international practice”. To do so is to leave the idea itself, and what it is expected to give way for unexamined. The writing relies on labeling and blaming, not analysis and thinking. I have been reading Meagan Morris’ “On the future of parochialism: globalization, Young and Dangerous IV, and Cinema Studies in Tuen Mun” in Film History and National Cinema, Studies in Irish Film 2, 2005), and have found it helpful in addressing the complexities of the problematic. My learning continues.
September 9, 2013
~end~
*An abridged version of this article was first published in Chinese in ARTCO, January 2013, Taipei, No. 244.
Note 1 - A number of art practitioners met with Chow Yung Ping and other ADC staff regarding the matter. In the meeting, we emphasized that we are not an organized group. Many had different views for how to make the presentation at VB better, including, but not exclusively, the possibility of setting up a permanent office managing it. ADC also mentioned there was the consideration of pairing up with the Museum of Art. The overall atmosphere was one of sharing and brainstorming ideas, and the meeting was proposed in good faith by the practitioners. Minutes are available on request from the author at yangy817@gmail.com.
Note 2 - Email dated July 19, 2012, sent to Yeung Yang in reply to the letter sent by all conveners on behalf of the petitioners on July 10, 2012.
Note 3 - I added this Postscript in December 2012 when asked by the Taiwan-based Chinese-language magazine ARTCO to submit an updated version of this article. I have included the published version in the AICAHK website.
Note 4 - I have the statement in Chinese only and am not aware of any English version. I have also tried to locate copies of the document on the HKADC website but have failed. I am happy to be corrected if I am wrong. This is my translation.
Note 5 - A public forum organized by conveners of the signature campaign “Call for better ethical practices of public institutions for contemporary art” http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/ was held at the Fringe Club on October 3, 2012. Executive Director of M+ Lars Nittve and Chairman of the HKADC Wilfred Wong were invited to speak.
Note 6 - Discovering Modernism. T.S. Eliot and His Context . New York: Oxford University Press. 1987:118-9.
Culture is…
1 Asking the right questions
In an interview on May 22, Undersecretary for Home Affairs Florence Hui Hiu-fai likened cultural policy to a tree growing out of the ground. It is a poor metaphor in two ways. First, it fails to address the current state of health of the soil; it assumes it is still good for growing. Second, it assumes that human deeds are comparable to nature’s deeds.
To free up our thinking so that the relevant and perennial contexts for such a thing as cultural policy can be introduced, let’s stop pretend that our current institutions of a bureaucratic kind could suddenly be vital, bountiful, and all-embracing the way trees can be. Let’s not pretend that the damage we have done to nature can suddenly heal like nature does to itself. Let’s start examining our culture as matters of human devising, be it for creation or destruction.
We already have and are in culture. We were born not an isolated self, but into communities of fellow beings and fellow species. Together we develop habits and ways of life. Therefore, the idea that one has to wait to be cultured is absurd. Culture is to do with meaning making. When everyone does it freely and in communities of others who are equally free, patterns take shape. Culture is constantly created and re-created. To make meaning alone in the reciprocal presence of others is an ordinary but transformative act. In the essay “The Fight for Culture” (The Times, jeanettewinterson.com, accessed May 24, 2012), British writer Jeanette Winterson says that “meaning is much more than a bank of information.” Something as basic as language, she says, is information at first but we quickly move beyond information into the realm of meaning – employing pattern, form, image, metaphor. We can do so as long as we are not interrupted. “All individuals share this instinct for meaning – that doesn’t make us all artists and poets, but it does make us all receptive to art and poetry – unless interrupted.”
Culture gets interrupted a lot these days, the way public spaces get interrupted and discontinued. Corporate culture interrupts culture. Consumerist culture that makes surplus production predictably obsolete interrupts culture. This is called compulsory obsolescence, sometimes known as expiry dates or lifetime warranty. Eradicating crowds and hawkers on the streets while letting in salespersons of property, cable tv, and internet companies interrupts culture. Bureaucratic culture that serves inertia and the status quo interrupts culture. The cult of instant gratification and instant disposal interrupts culture. Apathy interrupts culture.
However, when culture is recognized to be about meaning-making, we can start asking questions like what it is in our culture that has created conditions for those meanings we value, and those we do not. We can start asking questions about how culture could be free from those interruptions and free to create. To situate culture in the pursuit of freedom is to embrace everything on the principle of justice, not on the slogan of diversity that glosses over routine power hierarchies. The latter has generated an apathetic kind of tolerance that has corrupted the original idea of tolerance as a condition of living together, just as plurality is a condition of human life, not a social status, not an added value, and not a cultural capital. When Hui talks about cultural policy as finding a place for Hong Kong culture in the “international stage”, we see culture being interrupted precisely because it is confined to particular ways of producing, exporting, and distributing culture. Whether she knows this directly contradicts with the idea of letting the tree take root, and whether she knows that without much help from the government, numerous art and culture practitioners have already established vital, stable, continuous, and dynamic international connections with organizations on various levels in the world, we may never know. But for sure, we need no reminding that roots grow by penetrating, intertwining, stretching and reaching deep. They do not grow by marking territories, nor do they fly on airplanes. Roots grow freely, if they have adequate access to sunlight, fresh air, nutritious soil, and an occasional massage by earth worms. Internationalization on an institutional and policy level deliberately channels the roots in a slanted way. This is not a cultural vision. This is not a principle that articulates a value. This is merely a management of resources based on received conventions that are disguised as principles, clothed as economic, even cultural inevitability and (therefore) priority. Culture is about ensuring there are the widest available options for everyone to express who she is and how she is, not just one model of distributing resources. Culture is about everyone’s right to flourish and to attain a kind of well-being she autonomously chooses. Culture understood in this way can only be sustained as an explicit and visible, not metaphoric or fetishized relationship with nature.
The last point I will make here regards the demand from the culture sector that the position of Secretary of Culture be taken up by a professional. Head of the Chief Executive-Elect's Office Mrs Fanny Law says, “No one can know everything; no one can be the expert of everything in culture because its definition is very broad.” What she says cannot be truer, but it applies not just to culture, but life. No one can start to claim she knows how to live. In other words, the question on the professional is evaded. I would like to take it up here because it is important. I propose that to be professional isn’t to earn one’s living being in a certain profession. To be professional is to be fully aware at all times the potential and limits of the knowledge that informs and substantiates the relevant field, constituted by many other professionals. To be professional is to know where one stands, and how far one may go. A professional knows what she knows and what she doesn't. She knows her line of responsibility and the conditions that govern her code of conduct. In this sense, a professional is truly so only when she is not stagnated by a fixation on specialized knowledge, so much so that she becomes prejudiced towards her own expertise. Instead, she has a sense of the meaning of her expertise in the larger context, with a vision of the common good. Any doctor, for instance, who is an expert in her field, cannot be called a professional if she cannot ground her knowledge on the value of human life. A professional in culture cannot be called professional if she cannot see culture as an issue of justice, as an issue about recognizing everyone’s right to cultural expression. A professional is a specialist, but she knows where this specialization is situated. A professional may or may not have the relevant qualifications granted by some institutions. A professional may or may not be financially rewarded for her work. But for sure, a professional abides by principles, not routines.
2 Doing the right thing
Do we know how to talk about vision these days? Do we know how to engage in discussions about values and virtues?
Cultural policies with a vision are not about making exhibitions or producing full-house concerts. They are about making way for values to be nurtured. They are to do with what kind of life is worth living. We need a Secretary who is committed to protecting the right for everyone to be able to make meaning of their lives uninterrupted. When our everyday surrounding is over-spilling with advertisements pushing the property-owning dream, ideal homes articulated as hotels, and perfection articulated as slimmed bodies, our right to pursuing a life well lived is violated. To be able to defend this right despite social isolation, she needs to be informed by knowledge that is active, not stagnated. She needs to be aware of its limits and able to transform it into the desire and capacity to
keep learning. She needs to be educated in the sense not as having degrees and qualifications, but who thinks about thinking and enjoys thinking.
A cultural policy respects plurality because it is a condition of human life. From the position of culture, plurality is not the strategy of pluralism employed as an incentive for economic growth. It is the condition for the expression of everyone’s individuality. As humans, we flourish in plurality.
A cultural policy ought to commit to the continuity of public space. It is principled not on segregation but facilitating human locomotion. As humans, we walk; our bodies meet.
I would like to end with Joseph Beuys’ utopian dream that “Everyone can be an artist.” It is a dream carried on from Karl Marx, who believes in equality. Scholar Boris Groys argues this is implausible, and it is only because it is implausible that it could be a dream. Groys says, “the de-professionalization of art undertaken by the avant-garde should not be misunderstood as a simple return to nonprofessionality. The de-professionalization of art is an artistic operation that transforms art practice in general, rather than merely causes an individual artist to revert back to an original state of non-professionality. Thus the deprofessionalization of art is in itself a highly professional operation.” Now, if there is any suggestion from the Chief Executive-Elect's Office that “Everyone can be a minister, as long as she goes to the exhibition once in a while,” we ought to demand that it be done professionally, in the spirit of the avant-garde.
Yeung Yang
May 25, 2012