Report_Issue 1/2009 - Jubiläum/ 20 Jahre Mauerfall

“We also see our
collecting strategy
as a political
statement”
Antje Mayer: How long has Erste Bank been
collecting art?
Boris Marte: Erste Bank and its Central and
Eastern European daughter banks can look
back on a very long tradition of collecting and
promoting art. But our collection no longer related
to current tendencies in the production
of art and therefore did not meet the criteria
of the international art market. For this reason
we had our collection evaluated two years
ago by Rainer Fuchs, the deputy director and
academic head of MUMOK. On the basis of his
thorough and critical study the partner banks
in Central and Eastern Europe decided to formulate
a joint strategy that would enable them
to concentrate their activities in the area of collecting.
We have, so to speak, embarked upon a
new beginning.
A conversation with Boris Marte, sponsoring director of Erste Bank until 2008,
on occasion of the first exhibition of the Erste Bank Group art collection at the Museum
Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) and the tranzit workshops Bratislava.
— Antje Mayer talks to Boris Marte —
What criteria does Erste Bank apply in building up its collection?
As a bank our business focusses on Central and Eastern Europe. In terms
of investigation by art historians and a functioning art market this region
is still an unknown quantity. We developed our new collecting policy out
of this need. This means, to a certain extent, reformulating art history
and thus questioning the Western European canon of art. With this in
mind we offer professional conservation, research and presentation of
progressive art from the 1960s to the present day. The art we collect
comes from a geopolitical area where it is rarely given the opportunity to
present itself in an international context. Additionally, and this is something
unique, the intention is that the collection should become a platform
for dialogue, i.e., should it work on vital themes that are important
to the formation of an identity for this region.
That is to say Erste Bank is presenting a young
collection to the public at a relatively early stage.
Is this something of a risk?
What is being shown in MUMOK – and it is
important to emphasize this fact – are the first
steps in our new activity as a collector. Individual
works suggest a direction through the
quality of the erratic and the particular that
they bring with them. The exhibition is more
a suggestion of the future than the reality of
a collection. MUMOK invited us to make this
exhibition. After a lengthy discussion with the
art advisory council we gladly accepted this invitation.
On one major condition, however: it
seemed most important to us to express from
the very start the international nature and the
cross-border aspect of our collecting policy. For
this reason we decided to hold the exhibition in
two different locations at the same time, in the
tranzit workshops in Bratislava and in Vienna.
We were not just interested in the symbolic
content of this move, we were in fact more concerned
with extending the contact between two
cities that is still experienced far too little.
So this is not merely building up a
collection of things of value?
Well, we certainly want to build up an internationally successful collection
that represents something of value. An integral aspect of successful
collections is that, in terms of their value, the individual art works profit
from being part of the collection. But you cannot remove our collection
from its context. This is not possible in this cultural region and to do this
would not achieve a manifestation of the works.
It is noticeable that you often use the word
“politics” in connection with the collection, why
is this?
In the sense that our collecting budget is
not spent entirely on acquisitions, part of it
is used to relate the collection to the region
with the intention that it should be perceived
as a cultural area whereas at present the way
it is perceived is determined primarily by the
economy. We wish to consciously provide an
antipole to this. We also view our collecting
strategy as a political statement in the struggle
against the marginalisation of art and culture
in the transformation societies and in the
battle against a kind of nationalism that is, at
times, most aggressive and that seeks to exclude
everything that is different and diverse.
The full interview was published in „Report“ in May
2006 (online).
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