ARTIFICIAL HELLS

notes to pages 199– 202
had looted it.’ (James Roberts, ‘Down With the People’, Frieze, 12,
September–October 1993.)
16 Renée Green, for example, felt that it was impossible to produce something
meaningful in this environment; to do something socially ambitious
that would affect the residents, she claimed, she would have to learn to
speak French and live there for five years. (Green interviewed in Dillemuth,
Project Unité, DVD.)
17 Green, ‘Scenes from a Group Show’, pp. 133– 4.
18 Hal Foster, ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in The Return of the Real,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, p. 173.
19 Ibid., p. 196.
20 Philippe Parreno’s The Night of the Heroes comprised a fiction film on
video, co- authored with Bourriaud, using the apartment as the setting for a
story about a crazy man and a young girl who lived next door; the installation
featured a gothic church window and poetic texts written on cardboard.
The installation Suzanne et le Pacifique, a collaboration between Dominique
Gonzalez- Foerster and Anne Frémy, took the form of a colourful environment
partly based on a book by Jean Giraudoux about a female Robinson
Crusoe; the rooms also included references to different temporary architectures
and non- European uses of modernist architecture.
21 Smith’s harshest letter of rejection is for a young Maurizio Cattelan, who
proposed to organise a fake skinhead rally in Arnhem: ‘I don’t think you
have thoroughly thought out what you are proposing . . . If fear is really
the only emotion you want to evoke and this is the only way you can do
it then we cannot work together’ (Valerie Smith, in Sonsbeek 93, Ghent:
Snoeck Ducaju and Zoon, 1993, p. 35).
22 Smith in Sonsbeek 93, p. 8.
23 See Sonsbeek 93, p. 19 (Quinn), p. 17 (Boetti).
24 At one point Smith responds curtly to the artist Ann Hamilton, who is on
the verge of withdrawing from the show: ‘Getting your letter was a kind
of slap in the face after all this time. I am going through my own creative
process in making this exhibition and it has been very hard and difficult . . .’
(Ibid., p. 112.) We can compare this degree of curatorial control to that
of Mary Jane Jacob in ‘Culture in Action’: although she invited artists
with a track record of social engagement, her selection was also highly
directed, as Kwon has demonstrated with respect to Renée Green’s eventual
de- selection from the show. See Kwon, One Place After Another, pp.
140– 1.
25 A booklet explaining the objects accompanied the display, while Dutch
television made a programme showing the veterans installing the cabinets
and discussing their chosen objects. (Mark Dion, interview with the
author, New York, 21 August 2010.)
26 ‘It’s too bad that so- called social art or political art has a bad rep . . . For
me it’s not the result, it’s not the goal, it’s the way the artists approach
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