interview Charles Esche

8/10/2019 interview Charles Esche

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24 Issue 21 / December 2013

Interview with Charles Esche (New) Institution(alism)

Lucie Kolb & Gabriel Flckiger:We thoughta possible starting point would be the situation youfound yourself in when you started at Rooseum andthe formats you developed.

Charles Esche:When I started, that was in2000, the concept o an institutional solidarity andthat were trying to change institutions together wasnot really so apparent to me. Tere were certain indi-viduals that were interested in similar questions, butin most cases they werent really in charge o an insti-tution. Biennales and larger temporary events werethe things a ew riends and I had access to, ratherthan institutions. We were concerned with a widerwhat I would call then but not nowlefist, under-standing o what institutions could do in terms o

emancipation, in terms o community engagement,in terms o art as a potential way in which the reim-agining o the world could take place. I saw the insti-tution as a tool to investigate this question. Can artbe a useul democratic device? A device to installother orms o democracy than the ones we had?From the beginning, the entrails o social democracyin a country like Sweden were immediately ascinat-ing.

LK & GF: Would you say that this vision wasalready established when you were at Tramway, a

Scottish art spaceor asked differently: was it con-nected to certain places?

CE: When I started at ramway in 1993, it eltlike Scotland had been largely removed rom the cul-tural-political economic map, more or less rom theSecond World War onwards. It was marginal andmost o the ambitious artists lef or London. Yet, anew generation was more conscious o wanting tomake Glasgow an active place. So the main topic washow to get noticed and how to constitute an experi-mental Scottish art community, which wasnt simply

a regional outpost o an English cultural discourse. I

came rom England but quickly elt at home, maybebecause o my German amily and working-class ori-gins. In the mid-1990s, I elt part o a team that wasworking to build a situation where art could our-

ish. I worked with great pleasure with my own gen-eration, but I have to say that the political interven-tions by artists whom I invited, such as Allan Sekulaor Stephan Willats, were less understood and not thatwell received. Its a complicated path, but this wasa sign to me that I needed to ormulate my relationbetween art and politics in a different way.

LK & GF:Would you say that the exhibitions atTramway had the form of rather conventional exhibi-tions and then at Rooseum you also started to focuson other formats?

CE: For sure. I wasnt the boss at ramway.I had the charge only o the exhibition program. Iwould have done things in ramway differently, i Ihad been able to structure it ully, though I am proudo a project like Trustthat engaged artists as cura-tors in a team. Te questions that came to me once Itook up the director position at Rooseum were new,however. Tey involved structuring a whole institu-tion, marking it out rom others and also doing whatI really believed in. I didnt want to answer the usualexpectations in a traditional way, where you basically

wheel in the material rom outside, put it into theroom in a nice way and open the door. I wanted it tobe a place o what we then called knowledge produc-tion.

LK & GF:What does this mean?

CE: We developed different platorms; weworked with Critical Studies and the local academy,we had a thing called Open Forum that tried to cre-ate links with certain communities and activists, wedeveloped a Future Archiveo musical, lmic and lit-

erary inuences on artists and we had residencies

We were learning by doing

An Interview with Charles EscheReviewing the last years Charles Esche touches on aspects of curatorial networking, the pursuit ofredefining the institution and its inevitable necessity to affront people, as well as his notion of Exper-imental Institutionalism, which echoes in his current directorship at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.


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But ofen this public is a very incoherent group opeople and the question is how to sustain it. A publicalso ormed around the Van Abbemuseum last year,when we aced the opposition (again) o the socialdemocrats; they wanted to reduce our unding very

severely in order to control and popularize the pro-gram. Tis time we could mobilize and successullyresist, because it directly concerned the museum.At the Rooseum, in the early 2000s, the tensions otoday still seemed ar away. Te city was hardcoresocial democrat, the economy was growing, opti-mism about the new bridge to Denmark made eve-ryone quite content. Te major issue that was brew-ing was identity o course. We did a project called In2052, Malm will no longer be Swedishwhich con-sisted o residencies and productions. It includedEsra Ersen, Yael Bartana, Can Altaya group o art-

ists who could reect on this rom different perspec-tives. But it was not really picked up in the media orin politics at the time, again because things were stilljust too sweet to bother or because an art institu-tion was conned to the cultural and entertainmentpages. Again, I think the lessons o this went into theproject in Eindhoven.

LK & GF: Could you name certain projects orexhibitions at Rooseum that were successful?

CE: Fundamentally, I think those years were

about trying to shif the map o the place o artwithin the social ramework. Tere wasnt a realspace or social critique in northwestern Europeansociety; social democracy is a sort o totalizing sys-tem in an odd way, in that it embraces critique tonulliy it. We wanted to change that, given the apolit-ical condition post-1989. I think we succeeded to theextent that institutionalism and what to do with artinstitutions became a topic in general cultural dis-course. It was no longer do your job well but morewhat kind o job do you do? I think our publica-tion Rooseum Provisoriumis a rich source or these

debates. Te other map that I think we were tryingto shif was the geographic, which in early 2000 wasstill a cold war map in which the socialist states werenot really recognized. Tere was still a reluctance torecognize that a Polish or Latvian artist is as com-petent as an American or a German artist in a placelike Sweden. So we needed to recognize our imme-diate Baltic region or instance, or arts new capac-ity to intervene in the social afer the end o liberalautonomy as a progressive discourse. Tose changesseemed to be important, shifing the place o artwithin the map o social democracy and shifing

the map o art itsel within art historical narratives.

and studios. I think people who came to Rooseumgot very involved. At the same time, we alienatedother people who liked the old modernist Roo-seum. At the time it hurt, but nowadays, Id say youhave to have people that are really pissed off with you

and say that you destroy the organization in orderto know you are achieving something. I you donthave that, youre probably not really doing your jobas director. Your job requires you to bring in newimpulses and a new direction to a situation whilethere are many people or whom this is simply notnecessary.

LK & GF:What about the institutions relationto the public, did you attract a group of visitors oreven a new public that didnt exist before?

CE: Tere is this quote rom Vito Acconcithat I very ofen used, which is that a gallery couldbe place where a community can be called to order,called to a particular purpose. Tat still appeals tome. I like the idea that you do indeed create a pub-lic through your activities and I have seen thatemerge in Malm. I recently talked to a ew old col-leagues and I have to say that people rom that timein Rooseum seem to look back with great ond-ness on the projects we did. Also, I dont think youwould be here today i it hadnt had an effect. Yetthat public we created was not the one with suffi -

cient inuence to shape the city councils opinions.It was a younger public, not politically active or allthe right reasons o cynicism about 21stcentury pol-itics. Yet, as all social democratic art institutions, wewere dependent on political patronage or survivaland in this case local political avors. It is a compli-cated story because Rooseum was ounded by a neo-liberal collector, but then became dependent on thesocial democrats, who in many ways hated its ori-gins. Tis was all beore my time but it was a leg-acy I had to deal with. What I asked or, very naively,was ar-sighted politicians with an interest in art as a

way to think about and act out social change. Unor-tunately they didnt exist in Malm (or many otherplaces). Also, the art community can be very iso-lated or internally ocused. In Malm, or instance,there was no relationship between the small activ-ist community and the art community at that time,so we didnt have good routes into local political net-works. I think this was ailure o our approach andsomething I tried to address differently in Eind-hoven. Te other important issue, looking back, isthat it seems an urgent public probably only ormsin a moment o tension, like it was ormed in Istan-

bul during the demonstrations this summer (2013).


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and Vasi Kortun, o course. More than any otherindividual. Adam Szymczyk and Foksal Gallery inWarsaw, an independent space at that time, were acrucial link or me, as were the beginnings o whwin Zagreb. I was looking East mostly, while keeping

Scotland in mind. It was also more about peripheralplaces. Te centersLondon, Paris, even Berlinjust didnt eel right. Tey were already too occu-pied with the market, and Rooseum or Malm werean irrelevant inconvenience to them. Or thats howit elt. I guess you link with people who are hospi-table in the end. Also, I like the provinces, you areless under the microscope and can develop things. Ithink the impact o Rooseum was less immediate butmore lasting because o that.

LK & GF:Did you follow a certain vision with

your institutional practice?

CE: Whats important with that sense o NewInstitutionalism, or Experimental Institutionalismas I would preer to call it, is that education or rela-tionships with small, just orming communities werevery important or us. I think all o the places thatall under that umbrella were interested in small anddeep, not wide and shallow, in terms o audienceengagement. We needed to work with the public, toturn them rom audience to collaborators, to switchthe idea rom passive reception to people becom-

ing active shapers o that institutional message. Tatmeant that you reduce in a sense the scope o whoyou really want to talk to, and the danger was thatyou start to talk to the people who share an inter-est with you and close off to the rest. We could movemore quickly than i we had to carry the mass o thepublic with us, who did not quite understand whatwe doand we werent very good at or interested inexplaining it to them, because we were busy with theexperiment.

LK & GF:What was the size of Rooseums

audience?CE: Maybe 30.000, depending on the years, but

probably between 25.000 and 33.000. But we did getcommitted people, and there were art press articles, Iwould be interviewed by Artorum, Frieze etc. Terewas a certain awareness o what we were doing. WhatI was learning to do was how to talk about it in anacademic way, rather than popularizing it. When Icame to Eindhoven, I was determined to learn romthat and do things differently in terms o a broaderpublic.

Tinking about the most successul projects, Id lista ew solo shows like Superex and Nedko Solakov,group shows like Baltic Babel, or WeIntentionalCommunities, and also the Critical Studies course.Tere were also some great residencies by artists like

Luca Frei, Serkan zkaya or Lynn Lwenstein.

LK & GF: How was the relationship to theboard and the financial backer?

CE: None o it really worked. We had a boardthat didnt really unction. Tere was a board otwo people, nobody else wanted to be on the board.When I took on Rooseum it was more or less bank-rupt. We had one moderately rich collector who wason the board, Lars ullin, and he was the main per-son who supported us with bank loans. We also got

money rom the city and some oundations in Swe-den but it was not much. o the extent that we weresmart enough and aware enough we would iden-tiy certain unds that had an agenda and then tryto join our agenda to theirs. Tere was a Stock-holm-based Future Fund or instance that unded usthree times and then said they couldnt do it regu-larly. But we werent great at undraising, to be hon-est, so sometimes I couldnt pay my salary or amonth. In that sense, it was a constant struggle. Butsomehow you put things together and you survive. Idont think money is the main issue, when you have

a sense that you are trying to achieve something,you nd the means to do it. It was experimental-ism that we were interested in and that drove us. Wecouldnt sell experimentalism to a company and wecouldnt really sell it to a newspaper. Perhaps becausewe werent good at salesI think its my great weak-ness as a directorbut also because theyre inter-ested in short-term results above processes. Nowa-days we know that the neoliberal model ignores 70%o human needs yet even so it is still dominant. Ithink in those days that idea o ailure wasnt some-thing people understood yet. Tere were no chal-

lenges to neoliberalism then, only moderators.

LK & GF: Did you follow the institutionalwork of other people, e.g. Ute Meta Bauer or RogerBuergel?

CE: We were a bit young and naive and werentthat connected. Te artists locally were very impor-tant to me. People like Superex, Jens Haaning,Luca Frei, Alexander Gutke, Anna Ling, Kajsa Dahl-berg as well as curators like Simon Sheikh or Ger-trud Sandqvist. Catherine David, afer she did Doc-

umenta, I had huge respect or. Maria Lind or sure,


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space. o create waves and movementthat wasexperimental institutionalism or me, to move inexisting society. So it also elt like the school, the lab-oratories and the community center would have tomake room or usand that was denitely an aspira-

tional statement.

LK & GF:How did you perceive the 2003 pub-lication New Institutionalismby Jonas Ekeberg thatcoined the term?

CE: I know Jonas and I like him a lot. But as Itold him, I dont like the new bit, though I liked the-ism. I wanted my work not to be judged as a pro-posal or what could happen generally, but as exper-iments that produced an analysis. I we look now,we see that the things we called New Institutions

didnt actually produce anything stable and lasting asnew institutions. But they did produce experimen-tal results, which certainly inormed what Ive beendoing here at Van Abbemuseum and I think inormswhat other people like Maria Lind or Vasi Kortun,or instance, have been able to do elsewhere. But itwasnt that it became the new model. Which is againwhy I think that the name is wrong.

LK & GF:How were you connected with othercurators at that time?

CE: We had a small inormal group with Bar-bara Steiner and Bart de Baere called LeipzigerGruppe. I also tried to orm a closer alliance withCatherine David at Witte de With. But she lef, thenI lef, and the work took more shape in Eindhoven.We werent claiming those strategies as collectiveor combined, but there were joint learning experi-ences. Tere were two NIFCA conerencesStop-ping the Processand Changing the Systemthat wereimportant to connect us, but I think we were all justresponding to what we saw. Te question I asked inthat last exhibition at Rooseum, What happened to

Social Democracy?, was something that we shared;it meant that we wanted to build different kinds oinstitutions that could address the world as we sawit and not the world as the social democratic author-ities saw it. But I think people like Jonas and AlexFarquharson actually made us more conscious thatwe were doing similar things and I am or a com-parison o these institutional experiments, as I thinkthey each result in different outcomes. It is abso-lutely necessary now to write a historiography o thattime and to understand what happened in order tobuild on it and experiment anew. Its vital to ana-

lyze its strengths and weaknesses. When its not writ-

LK & GF: Concerning the discourse and peo-ple writing about New Institutionalism, the historicalcontext or the historicizing isnt really present. Thereare some examples, but theyre not making a geneal-ogy or the like.

CE: Tats why New Institutionalism both-ers me, because I think we were in an experimentalphase and I dont think we were conscious or strivingto be new. We were learning by doing, it was reallypragmatic in that sense. Lets nd out how thingswork, but on our terms. I dont eel happy about theword new because it is such a neoliberal term. Itsounds like new, improved washing powder orwhatever product to me, and thats not what it wasreally about. It was not a marketing tool and I thinkthis is why it ailed within the contemporary rame-

work o economic attention in a sense, although itdid clearly establish a certain identity. Neverthe-less I want to put the emphasis on an Experimen-tal Institutionalism, because I think this releases yourom the idea o creating a grand narrative o new-ness which implies that now all institutions shouldbecome like thisit was not the case that therewas an old institutionalism, but now theres a newone that will replace it. Rather we said times havechanged since the modern age and the institutionsdont know how to behave, so lets push them and seewhat happens.

LK & GF:Did the discourse around institu-tional practice have a legitimating or catalytic function?

CE: Denitely, i you speak about things theybecome real. It was about what the institution couldbeagain, the experimental nature o it meant thatthe statements you were making were also specula-tive or aspirational. Tis is where we wanted to placeourselves, working with a orm (the institution)in a place (Malm, Mnchen, Rotterdam or wher-ever) and asking what it meant in 2000 to be doing

this. We wanted the institution to become an activeplace and it elt like we could learn rom other insti-tutions while maintaining the traditional right toree space and experimentation that we inheritedrom the avant-garde and the Cold War. We lookedat the community center, the library, the laboratory,even the church, as models to eat up and reuse. Teseinstitutions were part o that comortable northernEuropean ecology that needed reormulating, aban-doning, reshaping. So thats why I said at the begin-ning that we could be part community center, partlaboratory, part school and not so much the show-

room unction that traditionally belonged to the art


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ten down its lost. Perhaps we need to be historicizedby another generation, by you who werent involvedand who need to come along and validate (or not)through your own experiences.

LK & GF:If you reflect on your momentaryposition, can you still apply the term experimental toit?

CE: Van Abbemuseum is a bigger platorm.But undamentally, its the same question: What canyou do with the museum in the 21st Century? Canit be the source o social and political questions,which visitors can investigate through the exhibi-tion, rather than a treasure chest where you justshow some beautiul jewels? Tis still seems exper-imental to me, in the sense that we dont know how

to answer that research question. I think as long asyou maintain that methodology youre still exper-imenting. Te moment you know the answer, youbecome an institution reproducing its own power. Ieel that the experiment is still urgently needed. As Isaid, we know now that neoliberalism doesnt workor the 99%, which we didnt know in those Rooseumdays. We know that the system o capital reproduc-tion serves only a very small number o people at thetop and that trickle-down is actually trickle-up awayrom the poor. We know that the systems that havebeen put in place as globalization allow economies to

grow, while demolishing social cohesion. Were muchmore critical o the current situation than we wereback in 2000. But we still dont have any answers orany bigger political projects. In that sense were stillin the experiment.

Charles Escheis a curator and writer. Director ofthe Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and has been appointedas curator for the Sao Paolo Biennial 2014. Co-founder andco-editor of Afterall Journal and Books and the ExhibitionHistories series. Between 2000-2004 director of Rooseum

Center for Contemporary Art in Malm.

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interview Charles Esche