Dagegen-Dabei: Production & Strategy in Art Projects since 1969
While the art market was being celebrated in a show entitled 'The Schürmann Collection' a stone's throw away in the Deichtorhallen, productive chaos was promised on the ground floor of the Hamburg Kunstverein. From here, the art collectives Botschaft, Büro Bert and minimal club were broadcasting a radio programme on Hamburg's Open Channel a week of critique of the media, music and technology, coming from an art institution that was now a broadcasting studio. Overflowing ashtrays, waste paper, club clothing and a mini-bar: a commune setting to which visitors were given scant access. During the live broadcasts, whispered interviews were held with the organisers, but the group's 'counter-publicity' (a battle-cry from the far left of the 70s) was produced so as to exclude the public, who could only hear it anonymously over their radios.
This dilemma is as typical of 'Art Projects since 1969' as it is for our contemporary situation: what effect, beyond the stabilisation of the group, do politicised and activist projects have on the public as a whole? Can institutions undergo a counter-cultural redefinition? Or is critique as a whole absorbed by the mainstream? And are the people who used to be 'dagegen' (opposed) now 'dabei' (part of it)? It is no coincidence that most of those invited to participate in the show come from Berlin, a city whose geographical insularity has had a deleterious effect on its institutional infrastructure, but a positive one on its subculture and political activities.
The choice of projects by Ulrich Dörrie (gallerist and editorial board member of the Kunstverein) and Bettina Sefkow (curator and former member of Hilke Nordhausen's legendary 'Buch Handlung Welt') provides a clear answer to one question: the concepts 'centre' and 'periphery', 'institutional critique' and 'context' that are now being discussed by a generation electrified by Post-modernism have historical precedents, most of them now forgotten. But the reasons for their failure are local, and not as system-related as we tend to think. The example of Büro Berlin demonstrates why it is that so many artistic suggestions are not taken up by society: the project was geared towards the aesthetic rather than the social aspect of 'public space' and it makes perfect sense that Raimund Kummer, Hermann Pitz and Fritz Rahmann should have pursued solo careers after their final project, Emotope. The bulk of the success of Dieter Hacker's 'Produzentengalerie', between 1971 and 1985, was in its response to the art world. Exhibitions like 'All Power to the Amateurs' or 'Kill your Gallerists' stressed the necessity of 'critical reflection on the art market', as the critic Lazlo Glozer put it at the time. But the 'folk art' proclaimed by Hacker or Andreas Seltzer only exceeded the boundaries of tolerance within the system, at most, working out some new claims.
Unlike the predominantly documentary projects 'Hotel-Pension Nürnberger Eck', 'Dia Zentrale Ost' or 'Galerie Eisenbahnstrasse' by Ueli Etter and Wolfgang Müller, the 'Verein für Vollbeschäftigung und Erforschung des Unbemerkten e.V.' (Society for Full Employment and Examination of the Unnoticed Ltd.), founded in Berlin in 1979 by Frank Barth and Regina Maas among others, provided a contemporary contextualisation of the problematic zone between artists and non-artists with a painting exhibition by Hans-Iwer Johannsen, an amateur painter and long-term Kunstverein employee. It gave a new perspective to the old conflict between distaste from the director's office and enthusiasm from the workforce.
Because the latent social options of art have been given new life since the early 90s, the fields of reference and means of production are changing: not autonomy, formalism and aesthetic theory, but social utopia, genetics and biotechnology; not paint pots and felt, but files and computer networks. But the dilemma will remain 'counter-publicity' can, at best, only be mobilised in a socially tolerated enclave of the counter-culture.
