ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
‘relational’ Europeans would come to perceive the critical mode as didactic,
while the North Americans would denigrate the relational work as
uncritically spectacular. Although there is a grain of truth in both characterisations,
these positions can be ascribed to different intellectual and
pedagogic formations in the 1980s: the French artists were reared on poststructuralist
authors (Lyotard, Deleuze and especially Baudrillard) for
whom there is no ‘outside’ position. The reception of critical theory in the
US was largely centred on psychoanalysis and the strong critical judgements
of the Frankfurt School, along with critical ethnography, identity
politics and post- colonialism, which gave rise to the idea of clearly oppositional
modes of artistic ‘criticality’. The resulting difference is between
forms that operate through fiction and opacity, and those that are expressed
unambiguously (through interviews, information, statistics, and so on).
We can move more swiftly through the other two exhibitions: one month
after the opening of ‘Project Unité’, ‘Sonsbeek 93’ opened in Sonsbeek
Park in the Dutch town of Arnhem. Unlike Firminy, which took place in a
city without a tradition of public art, Arnhem had intermittently hosted an
outdoor sculpture festival since 1949. For the 1993 edition, its North American
curator Valerie Smith produced a diaristic catalogue that usefully
allows us to trace the process of commissioning site- specific art at this
moment, and the curatorial expectations surrounding it. In this extraordinarily
frank publication, Smith reproduces her correspondence with
the artists, including failed and rejected proposals, and allows us to see her
criteria for inclusion and exclusion. 21 She proposes to make an exhibition of
work about ‘context- oriented issues’ and ‘the individual’s relation to the
social environment’: ‘The art for “Sonsbeek 93” should be site- specific or
situational work’, she wrote. ‘The work must create meaning from and for
the place in which it exists.’ 22 As she goes about negotiating with artists in
preparation for the show, she admits to her disappointment when they
arrive in Arnhem with a preconceived idea about what they want to do
(e.g. Marc Quinn) or when they avoid a site visit altogether (e.g. Alighiero
e Boetti). 23 Her assumption is that artists will spend at least twenty- four
hours in Arnhem and develop a response to the city, which will give them
a clear idea for a project – by today’s standards, a very brief time indeed.
What emerges from Smith’s candid publication of correspondence is not
just a case study in site- specific curating, but the clear impression that the
curator is no longer a mediator between artist and public (in the museum
model), but someone with a clear desire to co- produce a socially relevant
art for multiple audiences, and who views the exhibition itself as a total
argument. 24
Although most of the work in ‘Sonsbeek 93’ was sculptural, there were
two projects key to the history I am tracing. Firstly, Mark Dion’s intervention
in Bronbeek, a museum attached to the royal home for retired veterans,
whose collection comprised objects that Dutch soldiers and sailors had
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