ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
apparent: the photographs in Culture in Action are largely unhelpful illustrations
accompanying a series of conventional monographic essays and a
general theoretical overview; a busy layout with awkwardly cropped
photographs, frequently overlaid with text, tries to compensate for the
images’ inability to convey the complexity of each project. The two European
exhibitions are more adventurous in attempting to translate the new
attitude into publishing formats. As previously noted, the catalogue of
‘Sonsbeek 93’ took the form of a diaristic journal in which we follow the
curator’s attempt to communicate her desire for a contextually sensitive
art to a more or less willing selection of artists. Yet this catalogue is also
confusing, as the reader has no way of differentiating between proposals,
semi- realised projects, and those that became finished works. In the case
of Firminy, this research- based approach was to take the form of five
books, of which only three were produced: the first comprises the architectural
history of the Unité d’Habitation at Firminy, together with
sociological information about its inhabitants (age, class, occupation,
etc.). The second presents the project proposals, in greater or lesser
degrees of comprehensibility; some are shown as drawings, some as
essays, while some artists don’t contribute anything at all. The third
volume shows the final realised projects and installation shots. 36
Further differences can be noted between the European iterations of this
trend and the North American. Compared to the European shows, ‘Culture
in Action’ was fully theorised, grounded, critical, pragmatic and consistent
– but the professionalism of this structure also attracted criticism, even
from the artists (‘If “Culture in Action” often felt and looked like a charity
fundraiser, that’s because it articulated that queasy, self- contradictory relationship
between patronage and cause that such events always do’). 37 The
European shows were less rigorously analysed, more evocative, and
explored the social in the sense of a collaborative working process and
cultural patrimony, rather than targeting specific (and disenfranchised)
communities. The ‘social’ therefore holds myriad connotations at this
moment: dialogue, collaboration, process, diversified audiences, democratic
participation – with the spectre of socialism as a political analogue
for all of this hovering uncertainly in the background. The question of
how to gauge the success of these projects continues to be vexed. At the
time, they were almost unanimously perceived to be failures (as one
reviewer of ‘Sonsbeek 93’ noted: ‘[this] is primarily an exhibition by and
for the artists themselves. The public, unfortunately, is left stranded on
Platform 4B, secure only in the knowledge that they are missing something’).
38 Yet the task these exhibitions began to undertake was an
important one: to reconceive the audience as plural, a combination of
participants and viewers from many levels of society. 39
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