Download Art centres as total institutions

Art centres as total institutions
by Manuel Delgado
The Catalan Institute of Anthropology (ICA) has been long procuring formalisation and
discussion proposals about the relationship between artistic creation and urban life
through its Ethnography of Public Spaces Group. It is in this area that ICA has undertaken
several initiatives involving collaboration between anthropologists and creators in order to
contemplate, in a critical manner, what some of us –many of us– understand as the
divorce between art and everyday life. Areas we perceive as separate, and vaguely linked
among themselves through management by a minority of specialists. This opportunity,
brought by LIMEN, has allowed the Institute to call for and obtain collaboration between
various national cultural institutions with the objective of thinking and rethinking about this
question. This is done via a series of autumn conferences and round tables among
participating scholars from several countries, hosted in the Raval Campus of the University
of Barcelona, and simultaneous exhibitions in the various participating art centres.
The premises from which work has been undertaken in 2011 –the reporting of what we
think is an imposed growing distance between art and society, the vindication of the
creative nature of everyday life– drive us to questions formulated from both the
perspectives that LIMEN project makes coincide. On the one hand the perspective of
those social sciences belonging to the arts –anthropology being one of them– which have
insisted in warning about the complicit function of museums in certain political domination,
economic predation and social control strategies. On the other, the old unmasking vocation
of a good part of artistic vanguards and of those, more critical, social and political
movements which have been presenting evidence, for decades, of the tendency among
hegemonic sectors of society to hijack or monitor human creativity in order to make it a
source of symbolic legitimacy, when not just a simple business.
LIMEN is, therefore, an essay in order to think, and make others think, about the nature
and function of this radical compartmentalisation we currently consider as being imposed
on average street activities and the enclosed territories devoted to art and culture. These
find themselves segregated spatially in super-specialised places where expressions of
human nature generating worlds are conserved and protected from an outside that is
assumed as indifferent if not hostile.
This shared proposal to reflect about the walls that, literally, separate an inside in which art
and culture obtain the right to exist fully from an irrelevant and prosaic outside, where
beauty and intelligence have to be protected, has been titled LIMEN. This is in precise
reference to intermediary and passage spaces between rooms or between the outside and
the inside. Let's remember that Limen –or Limentinus– was one of the minor Roman
deities in charge of guarding door and window frames. To invoke him would protect us
from unexpected or undesired visits. Together with Carda and Forculus, he would receive
orders to defend against Strziga, evil spirits entering homes at night and sucking children's
blood. Symbolic anthropology and the work of Arnold Van Gennep use the term «limen» to
designate the middle stage of a rite of passage. In ritual initiations, the liminar phase is
when the neophyte goes across, being shown as having exited a previous social place, but
during which they have not arrived where they are expected yet. The ritualistic passer-by
is located, at this moment of the ritual, in an indefinite situation without structure, one
made out of ambiguity and ambivalence and inhabited by all sorts of monsters and
dangers.
Limen is used as a synonym for threshold. The descriptive word liminal is applied to
situations, or intermediate areas, between two stable sides of any given structure, while
limitaneus is the name given to a border being, a character imagined as inhabitant or one
that constitutes a limit or border.
Cultural containers in the postindustrial age
It has been repeated that the role segregated spheres of art and culture play nowadays is
that of some sort of official worship, a new edition of what in other ages and societies was
state religion. That in which the hegemonic powers of each time placed a supernatural key
to their domination and where their grandeur was staged. It was probably in order to fulfil
this job that the French Revolution, and every subsequent bourgeois revolution,
reconverted symbolic spaces of the old regime –churches, monasteries, castles, palaces,
aristocratic mansions...– into museums and other spaces considered «of culture» in the
modern sense of the term. A space, considered sacred in certain measure, where visitors
«cultivate» themselves –culture as a cultivated product, as cure of a human spiritual
potentiality conceived as a precious vegetable that needs to grow and give fruit or flowers–
but also cultor, the person who offers homage to the gods in Latin.
This vocation of appearing as places of cultivation and of cult at the same time is what
justified the grandiosity of art and culture spaces. Their pertaining solemnity as places
destined to become prosceniums of a new liturgy at the service of a specifically bourgeois
spirituality. Hence, also, their functionality as strong focal points wanting to be recognised
by a newly loyal population in urban sceneries, or as contenders wishing to be
incorporated into a new and now massive cultural aristocracy, as a continuation and
substitute of old cathedral-like sees.
Permanent residences for art and culture have substantially changed their appearance
and the relationship with their urban environment at the hands of modern movements and
rationalist aesthetic. The sacredness of these spatial presences, in which the ineffable
entities of beauty and creativity celebrated their mysteries, take now a different form. This
new form renounces the arrogant grandiloquence of what one day were palaces or
continued to be temples and assumes, as the dominant line since the 40s, the one
imposed by the building hosting MoMA in New York, the paradigm and referent to imitate
for decades. Its style is not that of overloaded grandiloquence inherited from ecclesiastical
powers or the exhibitionism of the old nobility anymore. The model is now a white cube, a
volume of clear lines and cold interiors that does not try to conceal its formal debt with the
asepticism of hospitals.
The postindustrial age and postmodern ideologies point, from the mid 80s, to a new model
for lining the depots where the truth of beauty, and the best of the human spirit, are kept
safe from life and people. It is from this moment that art and culture continue to be sacred
subjects around which a new clergy develops their activity. However, they now have an
even more strategic task than just convincing mortals about the emptiness of their
conventional lives. Now, these central figures have also been given the strategic task of
morally elevating spaces the capitalist re-appropriating of cities has previously marked as
desirable. These will be the object of diverse dynamics of urban space transformation as
business: thematisation of old neighbourhoods considered picturesque or venerable,
orientation towards services of previously industrial land, gentrification of urban centres or
peripheries, deportation of inhabitants considered undesirable, privatisation of formerly
public spaces... In every case it is thought the installation of a cultural container with
emblematic aspirations –usually commissioned to a famous architect–, or even the
expansion of authentic cultural clusters, are indispensable elements in order to redefine
–even though one should probably say redeem– certain urban spaces.
This is the moment during which the urgency to convert what had been certain industrial,
civil, military and religious installations into conservation and dispensation of cultural truths
bursts in. These buildings now house authentic natural reserves of the best of human
creation and knowledge. We have plenty of examples nearby: Museu d'Art de Sabadell,
Galeria d'Art Antiga Fàbrica Noguera in Beseit, La Farinera de Vic, Centre de Creació d'Art
Escèniques at Can Gassol in Mataró, Can Domènech in Cerdanyola del Vallès, Fundació
Tàpies in Barcelona... In 2008, Barcelona's local government drove forward a project
called Fàbriques per a la creació (factories for creation). This was presented as a new
boost to its industrial reconversion plan via the generation of new multi-purpose cultural
equipment destined to the «formation, dissemination, experimentation and creation of art»:
Sabra i Coats in Sant Andreu, Illa Philips (Sants-Montjuïc), La Seca (Ciutat Vella), La
Escocesa (Sant Martí), La Central del Circ (Sant Martí), l’Ateneu Popular 9 Barris (Nou
Barris), Hangar (Sant Martí) and Nau Ivanow (Sant Andreu). Sometimes, the fact that an
old factory has been reconverted into a «cultural factory» is made explicit as it is the case
of Espai Cultural de Roca Umbert in Granollers.
However, not only industrial remains are destined to the production and virtual distribution
of artistic creation and culture. We also find old prison buildings such as MEIAC in Badajoz
or MARCO in Vigo. Sometimes, the reference can be limited to the occupation of old jail
grounds such as Filmoteca de Barcelona, located where Barcelona's female prison used
to be. Or military barracks, bastions, citadels..., in the same way as MAXXI in Roma, or
similar cases closer to us, even if it is just on top of old grounds as is the case of Bòlid in
Girona. In some other places old cemeteries have been adapted –prisons for the dead as
prisons are cemeteries for those still alive– as is the case of CGAC in Santiago de
Compostela. In fact, cold architectural propositions such as that of Auditori de Barcelona
suggest a huge coffin. Sometimes, we also find hybrid examples, factories converted into
barracks before becoming art and culture centres, such as Barcelona's CaixaFòrum. Or
buildings that used to house guilds, or industrial warehouses, military or police equipments
and finally local referents of cultural creation such as La Panera in Lleida. It goes without
saying that the white cube model evoking a hospital is still current in newly built spaces
such as MACBA in Barcelona. Convents are also still being converted into current art and
culture centres: CCCB or Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona or Cal Rosal in the Berguedà
region. The Museu Comarcal d’Olot was conceived as a hospice but ended up being used,
among other things, as barracks and also as an asylum. The Centre d'Art de Pintura
Catalana Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza had to choose, at the time of finding its location in
Sant Feliu de Llobregat, between an old monastery, an old hospital or an old factory.
What is a total institution?
Convents, factories, barracks, hospitals, cemeteries, prisons... What do these buildings we
now see converted into contemporary art museums, or versatile centres of current culture,
have in common? As they are containers, what do they contain in relation to what they
used to contain before? What do they conserve from their old use and function?
We could begin to answer these questions by noting that these establishments we have
just enumerated were one day what used to be known, and still are in most cases, what
social science designates as total institutions. A total institution is –according to its main
theoretician, Erving Goffman– an enclosed and isolated space inside which a human
collective lives or spends most of its time. Those confined inside are either totally or
partially limited from leaving and most aspects of their lives are developed inside the
premises, under the intense watch of specialised staff. Examples are penitentiary
institutions, boarding schools, hospices, asylums, barracks, ships and also factories. Let's
not forget the reason why Bentham designed his panopticon was in order to control
workers in factories, even if it ended being applied to watching prisoners.
The concept of total institution is usually applied to any installation or confinement instance
in which internal organisation absorbs the life of those who are subject or subjected to
such encapsulation in an absolute manner. Corridors, halls and any intermediate or
passage ways are objects of special attention inside total institutions as it is there where
most transgressions of internal regulations occur.
About confinement and art freedom
LIMEN is formulated as an interpellation, a question and a place for debate. Does this
conversion of what used to be confinement spaces into centres and headquarters of
intelligence and creation –often keeping the same old name as if making explicit the will to
conserve not only memory but also meanings and functions– imply accepting a certain
analogy between what used to happen inside their walls and what happens now? Are
artistic and thought centres also small or big factories destined to the production of works
of art and ideas where a new and singular working class –referred to as «creative class»–
is put to work? Let's not forget that, effectively, Bentham's dispositive of control was initially
designed for factories before being applied as a control measure for penitentiary
population. Also, don't we increasingly hear talk about «cultural production», «cultural
infrastructures», «creative sector»? Few doubt nowadays that the current moment
corroborates the post-Fordist society tendency to contemplate the hazy field of culture as a
wealth generating industry giving rise to a new spectrum of entrepreneurial and labour
relationships.
Parallel to this, is it not a, significantly called, «exhibition curator» a figure that invites us to
make an automatic connection with the type of activity that is developed inside hospitals?
Would the residential function for curators that certain cultural institutions assume, not be
part of a family of boarding schools, rehabilitation centres or youth correctional facilities,
another variation of total institution? Is the assumption of art and creation as an exquisite
exclusive bastion for a «knowledgeable» minority, the only ones enjoying the content of
premises destined, in their current use, to complete great urbanising operations, or
legitimise and award prestige to their private or institutional sponsors, not being made
explicit, even in a more specific way that up until now? If that were the case, the
radicalisation of the brutal division between art and life we believe a capitalist society to be
witness and victim of, could be understood. Currently we find works of art, and often
creators, literally entrapped –as they confine ill people or prisoners to their enforced
retirement– in what used to be, and continue to be, confinement spaces. The same way as
convent walls contain what has been wanted to be kept separate from prosaic worldliness.
Is it accidental that a good part of dissident political activity is nowadays developed in
museums and contemporary art centres as if transferring social questioning and conflict
inside them would extract them from their natural environment, i.e. the street?
On the one hand we find centres, convinced to be contributing to approaching the public to
values of creation, intelligence and beauty, constituting an attempt for the realisation of
those in a given time and space, fostering also their ability for critical thinking and social
action. On the other, a position, inherited from the old critique of the institutionalisation of
human creativity, maintaining that art had never been so subjugated and subservient as it
currently is. Never has its enclosure been so severe, away from society and life.
Hence, social sciences are raising this debate, inviting different creative centres to a
shared reflection on the subject of two questions, the definition of which begs for the
contribution of the theoretical and conceptual apparatus of anthropology and sociology.
First, we find a question about thresholds, spaces that separate and bring together social
compartmentalisations at the same time. The outside and the inside of institutions
dedicated to art and contemporary thought in this case. Then, we look at the clarifying
value the concept of total institution contributes when recognising the nature and the role
of places, once used for confiscation and confinement, in order to keep inside works of
creative expression so as to isolate them enough from an outside that is considered
unworthy, dangerous or perhaps just more free.