Maria Lind: “There is a gigantic, systemic fault in Sweden”
What is the future of art institutions in Sweden and abroad? Where is the money to finance them and who is in control? Milou Allerholm has talked to Maria Lind.
Maria Lind is one of Sweden’s best-known figures in the international art world. Since the middle of the 1990s she has been one of the people responsible for keeping Sweden online with the rest of the world. During her time as a curator at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, while David Elliott was director, she showed that even an established museum can remain on the cutting edge of the art discourse.
Award for “curatorial achievement”
Maria Lind is currently in charge of the master’s programme at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in the USA. This post enables her to work with her own research projects as well as teaching and curating exhibitions. She was recently awarded the legendary America curator Walter Hopp’s prize for “curatorial achievement”; recognition that causes Swedish colleagues to sigh enviously. Walter Hopp is not just famous for having organized the first museum exhibition of Marcel Duchamps’ work. During the 1960s he was also responsible for hanging works by American artists on a merry-go-round – something widely considered scandalous at the time. But who would not want to see a Mark Rothko painting hanging on a horse on a merry-go-round?
The exhibition as format and medium
Maria Lind often emphasizes the importance of constantly rethinking the exhibition as format and medium. Many people are aware of this today. It has become increasingly difficult to work in a qualified and experimental manner within the framework of a great many museums and public galleries. In recent years there has been a lively international debate on the future of the art institution, not least concerned with the direction in which the major art institutions are developing. I met up with Maria Lind when she was on a visit to Stockholm because I wanted to hear how, given her experience, she views what is happening at the art institutions in Sweden and in the rest of the world.
Maria Lind: If we start with the situation today it is patently clear that the publicly financed art institutions in Northern Europe have entered a new phase. This means that they produce exhibitions that court the public to a greater extent. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with exhibitions that appeal to the public but if this develops into populism, which is often the case, then one is in very dangerous territory. Art institutions are now expected to finance part of their activities themselves and they want to achieve this by gate money. And so they need as many people as possible to cross the threshold.
Milou Allerholm: Is this a political requirement?
ML: It can be a requirement of the government but need not necessarily be so. But the institutions want to demonstrate their competence by showing these figures. There is, of course, a financial aspect but there is also a measure of anxiety. Of demonstrating one’s relevance in quantitative terms.
MA: Why are attendance figures so important today?
ML: In order to prove that one’s operations reach out to the public. Since we are talking about the tax-payer’s money there is a healthy logic to this. But there is a crucial point to it all: if one maintains that the tax-payer’s money should benefit everyone, then one needs to ensure that even people with special interests get their share too. In other words, it is important for institutions to have the full spectrum. They need things that appeal to many but also the more experimental aspects.
MA: If one compares with forty years ago, is it really the case that people look more closely at attendance figures today?
ML: This is clearly the case. It has been going on for some time but has become all the more evident today. Here it is, of course, important to be specific. There are differences between different museums. But this is part of the neo-liberalization of cultural politics. If we take the USA as an example, there is a definite requirement for high attendance figures there. And they have a completely different system of funding their art museums based on donors. There are trustees and donors who often have a major influence on what is shown at the museum.
MA: This touches on a critical discourse that has become increasingly articulated in recent years. Many people today see private and commercial interests gaining an ever-greater influence over what art is shown at an artistic and curatorial level.
ML: Indeed. What we have seen in Northern Europe is a greater degree of the instrumentalization of art. Government grants have not necessarily been reduced. The real difference is that government funding is earmarked for specific purposes in a way that it did not used to be. Abandoning the arm’s-length principle is more rule than exception today. But it is no accident that, in the USA, art that is less object or image based is less common than it is here. This is no system of funding, there are no grants to artists of the sort that have been able to support much of the type of art that we can see in Northern Europe.
MA: How do you regard the situation in Sweden today? The fact that the major art institutions have become more market-oriented, or how one is to describe it. How do you see this in a broader perspective from the point of view of our specific system?
ML: There is a gigantic, systemic fault in Sweden, that we neither have independent funding nor tax-relief for donations to cultural activities. As a producer of culture you cannot apply for funding for an exhibition, for example. If I, as a curator, have a really good idea and have the support of a number of artists who are really keen on the idea, there is nowhere we can apply for funding.
MA: But as an artist one can apply for money, for example, from the Visual Arts Fund?
ML: True, but as a cultural producer one cannot apply for funding. For a time it was possible for curators to seek funding on behalf artists but never for their own work. And this possibility no longer exists. Nor is there much funding available from independent sources that smaller or medium-sized institutions can apply for. So, on the one hand there are demands from the government and the civil service for self-financing and, on the other hand, there are very few possibilities of achieving this. Our system of grants does not allow this. And we do not have what is common in Germany: foundations that one can apply for funding from. Now that “Framtidens kultur” is being closed the situation looks dismal. In Sweden we also have very few private donors – common in the USA. I do not believe that it is necessary for Moderna Museet, a fully government funded institution, to flirt with gallery owners and donors in the way that it currently does. If there is a requirement for self-funding, then the museum can engage in joint projects within the framework of the EU cultural budget. This would be a more fruitful alternative. I see their behaviour as testifying to what I mentioned earlier: being best in the class. They are adapting the American way without this being necessary. This makes me wonder whether they are opening up to something that may then be exploited by the Ministry of Culture: “look, one can do it like this too”.
MA: What do you think will happen with the major Swedish cultural institutions in the future?
ML: That will depend on the visions that the leadership entertain. If one looks at Moderna Museet, for example, what is fantastic is the fact that visitors are welcomed to the museum in a way that they were not ten years ago. This is a matter of the design of the lobby, how the restaurant functions, how information is conveyed by signs and by the museum guides. This is a vast improvement. But their programme is anxious. They like to speak of themselves as a world-class museum. Fortunately, the art world consists of many layers, numerous groupings and many different interests. But in the world in which I move, Moderna Museet never turns up in conversation.
ML: If we are to look at the future, a new vision is needed. Much energy is invested nowadays in trying to create an artistic canon. This is the classical, though somewhat old-fashioned way of writing art history. Personally I am more interested in creating a dialogue, a debate in which people can have radically different ideas. Where the aim is not always to agree. The museum could work like that too, more concerned about how a public institution can be more active in the discussion of public policy. I am convinced that this would be possible without lessening the integrity of the art. Nowadays such a task would be almost without extra costs in that a major part of contemporary art shares this interest and has its tentacles stretched in that direction.
MA: Regarding an American context, for example the fact that trustees have a greater influence on what museums purchase. How widespread is this? How true is it that economic factors are gaining increasing influence?
ML: This is entirely true of the USA. At least with regard to institutions that mount exhibitions. It applies both to the collections and to the people who exhibit. Though there are pockets of otherness, of what is different. Nowadays there are many people who have moved to educational institutions, just as I have done. People who see educational establishments as places where one can do things differently. At a college or university the process is generally at the centre as is discussion. So we have seen an exodus of curators who have moved – abdicated one might say in certain cases – from prestigious art institutions to educational establishments. This is particularly notable in the USA. Russell Ferguson, who was at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, is now head of UCLA:s Department of Art. We have Jens Hoffmann at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, part of the California College of the Arts. There is Ute Meta Bauer at MIT. And there are others. This movement is a reflection of how difficult it is to function as a curator, as a thinking, writing and researching cultural producer in the exhibiting institutions today. Nowadays, if one wants to work with art in a concrete manner, a post as curator or director of a public institution is no longer a self-evident choice.
MA: If one looks at the situation of art today, there are few major institutions that can look after the new art that is currently taking form. I am thinking of art projects that are more process oriented and that continue as research projects over a longer period of time.
ML: As a counter to this situation, more and more groups are organizing themselves. It is often these self-organizing groups that demonstrate some form of visionary thinking today. Who determine what they want to do themselves. One can see something similar in small and medium-sized institutions today. A relatively new institution that I follow with interest today is the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst [Museum of Contemporary Art] in Leipzig which opened in 1998. This was the first institution for contemporary art in the former DDR. I also interest myself in what Charles Esche does in Eindhoven at the Van Abbe Museum. WHW, a collective from Zagreb who are going to produce the next Istanbul Biennial are also interesting. But so is Platform in Istanbul which is a combination of exhibition venue, archive and studio programme. In Sweden at the moment, Index, Konsthall C and Marabou Park in Stockholm fulfil something of this role as do Signal in Malmö and Verkligheten in Umeå, though they are seriously under-funded.
MA: Will there still be art in the sense that we think of it today?
ML: I believe, as I stated before, that educational establishments will become more important. Though they are not perfect refuges since there is a marketing orientation there too. Partly on account of the Bologna process but also because of demands that students should pay for their education in the future. But at the moment there is more room for manoeuvre in the education world than anywhere else. At the same time it is important to remember that the commercial world can also be creatively innovative as, for example Galerie Esther Schipper in Cologne or the Air de Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. They were the first to work with pioneering artists like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno.
MA: It is interesting to place the “flight to educational institutions” in relation to the ambition of maintaining artistic independence. What happens to the concept of autonomy if art increasingly becomes a protectorate of colleges and universities?
ML: Autonomy also has relevance. It is concerned with when, where and how. Not that one model should take over but of what suits when; of when something is fruitful. The self-organizing groups are often looking for some form of autonomy. I like to speak in terms of strategic separatism. As an essential manoeuvre for having the opportunity to produce art without overly great compromises.
MA: If one thinks of Marysia Lewandowska and Neil Cumming’s film which was shown at the Moderna Museet last summer. Their film is a vision of the future, of what will happen to the museum up to the year 2058 (the centenary year of the museum). They predict that art and society will move towards a situation in which there is a greater polarization between purely commercial art, art that is more or less commissioned by an art market and another sort of “emerging” art. Is this the direction that things are going?
ML: Definitely. And that is sad. Even though we have had this division in the past it has become much more evident. For a long time I have regarded large institutions like the Tate and MoMA as media entities, like substantial TV channels. They take it for granted that there are only certain things that people can see in a strictly regimented format whatever the channel that one tunes in. The museums have adopted much of this logic. And again, I am not sure that they need to do this. I should like to see what happens if someone with different visions comes along
Milou Allerholm
Art critic and member of the Spana editorial committee