By Dr. Phil. Lily
Fürstenow-Khositashvili
With Marcel Broodthaer's “Musée
d'Art Moderne” back in the 60-ies and its institutional critique,
it has been long evident that gone are the days when museums used to
function as spaces
for the cultural enlightenment of the
bourgeois public sphere. The traditional “historical” museum
invested with pedagogical and emancipatory functions relatively free
from commercial interests turned instead into an institution of
production of contemporary art. As elements of culture industry
influenced by art markets, entertainment, spectacle, marketing,
advertising, political intrigues and public relations museums and
“kunsthallen” are likely to open up new spheres for artistic and
curatorial practices.
Those attempting at defining the
autonomous, artist-created spaces within the museum context are
particularly dependent on the administrative and ideological powers
represented by museums. Installations and direct intervention
policies used by certain artists to separate themselves from the
institutional powers of order and domination are as destined to
failure as ever. Yet one hopes against hope.
It comes as no surprise that an
artist's attempt to inscribe oneself into an institutional framework
by a sign of void, a Hole for example (with the capital H as the
author NatHalie Braun Barends puts it), would become an issue of a
heated controversy. An opening penetrating all the levels of the
building of the Kunsthalle Mannheim entitled “HHole for Mannheim”
by Braun Barends literally breaks the frames, allegorical or real.
Her artwork is an attempt to re-frame, a poetic aspiration to
redefine the artist's space within the traditional white cube and, in
NatHalie's case, an example perfectly showcasing the precariousness
of artistic freedoms within contemporary cultural industry.
NatHalie Braun Barend's HHole in the
Kunsthalle Mannheim as an artistic gesture of marking the space,
re-directing our vision from the inside to the outside, opening up
new horizons, reinterprets the old art historical metaphor of seeing,
of creating a window towards the outside in order to better visualise
what is to be seen. James Turrell seemingly inspired by HHole created
a similar installation five years later in Bremen. The “Holei”
Hole by NatHalie Braun Barends was the first of the permanent
multimedia installations created by her for Kunsthalle Mannheim. Her
other installation, PHaradise, at the cupola and side wings of the
Kunsthalle Billing Bau, transformed the building's architecture and
established a luminous artistic dialogue with the installation of
James Turrell - Floating Windows - and the sculpture park.
The administrative changes within the
Kunsthalle Mannheim, sadly enough, take their toll on the policies of
what is being exhibited and what not, what stays and what disappears.
Ironically it's the HHole, piercing all the levels of the central
part of the Kunsthalle's Athene Trakt, that was initially celebrated
but later, with the museum's administrative changes, suffered because
of internal intrigues. What's the sense of a void, an opening within
a society that would not see through? Evident is however that an
artwork as well as the sign of its actual absence marked by the void
is the liberating artistic gesture that is subject to arbitrary
destruction, once again adding to the discourse about a museum as an
institution of power, ideological influence and external determinacy.
