Download pdf version of issue no. 16 (4 Mb) - Pavilion

Contemporary Art Centers and their offshoots
- were viewed as urgently needed
means of balancing, contesting, and
even confronting, the monopoly of the
powerful state-governed and -supported
art institutions. Their important political
agenda was to stand up to communist
ideology, in favour of an ‘Open Society’
purportedly by promoting the new art
media.[10] However, there were instances
where an ambiguous kind of unwritten
agreement was reached between the
centre and margin, and between the
mainstream and alternative.. Therefore,
the internalisation of institutional critique
on the part of these new institutional
models for almost a decade threatened to
become an even more centralised
monopoly of power, at least in cultural
environments where the state institutions
collaborated closely with their critical
counterparts.
The most interesting example of this kind
of merging of state power with oppositional
institutional critique was the collaboration
between the Soros Contemporary
Art Center Skopje and the Skopje
Museum of Contemporary Art that started
with the very beginning of the activities of
the SCCA-Skopje, in 1994. At that time
the Museum of Contemporary Art was at
its undisputed acme, as the lead institution
for the presentation of international
contemporary art in Skopje, and the only
institution professionally capable of representing
Macedonian contemporary art
abroad.
The Museum of Contemporary Art was
established in1964, as the outcome of a
political decision, embodied an Act of the
Skopje City Assembly, to host the collection
of art works that hundreds of interna-
[38]
tional artists had donated to the city
immediately after the catastrophic earthquake
of 1963. The new museum, which
opened in 1970, was one of very few
museums of contemporary art in the
region and could thus be regarded as a
cultural institution of exceptional importance.
The plans for the building were
themselves a gift to the city by the Polish
architects J. Mokrzynski, E. Wierzbicki
and W. Klyzewski and envisaged a total
area of 5000 square metres, with over
3500 square metres of exhibition space,
plus storage space, cinema, archives,
library and all the other necessary concomitants.
[11] However, the museum’s
administration always had a struggle to
manage its assets and the building was
completely run down by 1994, as a result
of the poor decision the management had
taken, to redirect the funds assigned to it
for acquisitions and structural maintenance
into programme activities. (Recent
examples of this tendency have included
the decisions to use maintenance funds
to cover the expenses of an exhibition in
Japan, in 2000, and to use rental income
from a wedding reception at the museum
in 1998 to pay for the cost of a museum
café in 1998, instead of repairing the
roof). The decision not to spend funds on
structural repairs to the roof, in particular,
has led to the catastrophic situation in
which the entire collection has had to be
removed from public display for the last
fifteen years or so, and more and more of
the museum’s important potential longterm
partners, such as international foundations
and other museums, have abandoned
any thought of collaboration,
because of the risk of showing any valuable,
or sizeable, exhibitions under such
conditions. [12] The first serious attempt to
reconstruct the building was started only
recently, with the support from the Italian
Government, but a question mark hangs
over the condition of the works that have
been held in storage under appalling conditions
for more than fifteen years [13]
This policy of self-promotion on the part
of the museum’s curatorial team, and of
support for only a handful of favoured
artists, has gradually resulted in the building,
and the institution itself, becoming
completely marginalised within society
and by the general public. Attempts by
independent artists and critics to protest,
in the name of democracy, against this
centralised abuse of power have been
isolated and doomed from the outset.
Indeed, any outsider attempting to criticise
the institution has risked a form of
ostracisation that is virtually tantamount
to committing professional suicide. On
the one hand, artists and critics who
voice any kind of criticism are ruled out
from participation in any creative initiatives.
On the other hand, ciriticality turns
into a vicious cycle, so that those
expressing critical views have been prevented
from taking any initiatives of their
own through the combined opposition of
institutional critique and institutional
power.[14]
The best example of this perverse state
of affairs is provided by my earlier comment,
to the effect that the Soros Center
for Contemporary Art Skopje had initially
been promoted as a kind of alternative to
the Museum of Contemporary Art. What
actually happened was that, when the
SCCA-Skopje joined forces with
Contemporary Art in the early 90s, it
brought even more power to the museum.
Of course, there would have been
nothing wrong with this, if it had not
directly affected the wider art scene in
Macedonia. Mainly because of the
monopoly of power in the display of contemporary
art, hardly any criticism has
been directed at to the problematic artistic
and cultural policies that are being pursued
by the museum. It has even
become impossible for artists who are not
interested in the issues that dominate the
MOCA/SCCA’s agenda of large-scale
group exhibitions and electronic arts to
exhibit in the framework of these institutions.
Today many things have changed. The
weakening of the SCCA-Skopje, due to
the loss of support from its main benefactor,
and the right-wing nationalistic cultural
policy of the governing coalition that
places greater emphasis on national heritage
and archaeology, and less on contemporary
art, have led to a general deterioration
of the situation and a decline in
these institutions’ once untouchable
monopoly. Paradoxically, this worsening
situation in the museum has opened up
the possibility of new kinds of institutional,
or non-institutional, practices.
Some recent public-private collaborations
are especially relevant here. Independent
initiatives, such as the press to exit project
space in Skopje and the Tocka
Cultural Centre, in Skopje, function in a
similar way to better known and longer
established alternative spaces, such as
Kuda, in Novi Sad, P74 in Ljubljana,
WHW in Zagreb, and Remont in
Belgrade. These all function in such a
way as largely to overcome the performative
contradiction in institutional critique
and its unhappy consciousness, and succeed
in producing art projects that deal
with institutional critique in a more posi-
[39]