A Symposium on Colour as an Agent for Taste, Experience and Value in the Exhibition Space.

This symposium is dedicated to the use of colour and its function in the exhibition space. At the beginning of 2019, the walls of the exhibition Noise! Frans Hals, Otherwise in Frans Hals Museum – Hal changed from a neutral white to a yellow-green that becomes increasingly intense throughout the exhibition. From this moment on, the artworks have thus been displayed in a radically different environment – an environment that is anything but neutral. This raises questions as to what such a colour scheme does to the works on view, and how it alters the viewer’s experience of the exhibition.

On 24 May 2019, a symposium was organised to contextualise this change. It asked what role wall colour, and colour more broadly, has had in the making of exhibitions, why certain colours are used more frequently than others, and how these questions relate to changing tastes, visual appetites and values attributed to art. In contrast to contemporary art, where they are rarely seen, exhibition walls painted various colours are often used to display old masters. Why then do museums, including the Frans Hals Museum, apply different exhibition strategies to artworks from different time periods? Departing from the question of how the use of colour has changed historically in the exhibition space, it examines how this connects to a broader visual economy and the entertainment industry museums are increasingly part of. Lastly, it raised the question of what kind of value judgments and belief systems are attached to something as innocent sounding as colour.

The event marks the beginning of a programme on Institutional Critique that will unfold at the Frans Hals Museum during 2019 and 2020. The practices of Institutional Critique are often described in terms of what they do, shifting the attention from the art object to reveal the infrastructures that support and contain it. White walls are the prototypical setting for contemporary art; they form the infrastructure through which we come to recognise art as art. While seemingly neutral, this white setting – also known as the white cube – is a carefully crafted, institutionalised space. It tells us that the things it holds are to be perceived as art, and hence looked at and valorised differently than when in the world outside.

In her influential book "Spaces of Experience, Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000," Charlotte Klonk establishes a link between the consumerism of the 1950s and the rise of the white cube as spearheaded by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She concludes that the white cube was elected as the preferred exhibition interior because it was seen as the ideal environment to educate the tastes of its visitors. A skill – as it was argued by MoMA’s founding director – that could then be put to use in the budding consumer society of the time. Klonk thus points out that there is a nexus between art viewing and consumerism, one that has been actively supported by the white cube formula. If we bring this conclusion into the present, following Klonk, we might ask: how does the exhibition experience relate to the choreography of desire that is created in today’s attention economy? What role does the exhibition space and the way it is fashioned play in light of the current visual economy, as one that is increasingly characterised by online platforms and forms of consumerism in which images play an ever more important part?

With:
India Mahdavi, Designer, Architect, Colourist, Paris
Daniel Morgenthaler, Curator, Helmhaus Zürich, and Lynne Kouassi, Artist, Zürich, on their exhibition Of Colour (2019)
Charlotte Klonk, Professor of Art and New Media at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Author of "Spaces of Experience" (2009)
Jessica Stockholder, Artist, affiliated with the University of Chicago, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin Steven ten Thije, Research Curator, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Melanie Bühler, Curator Contemporary Art, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem

The symposium is organised in cooperation with the Art History department / Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, Universiteit van Amsterdam and the Centraal Museum Utrecht.

The symposium is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and Goethe-Institut Netherlands.

Programme
13:30-13:50 Welcome and Introduction by Melanie Bühler
13:50-14:20 Presentation by Charlotte Klonk Different Shades of White: Coloured Walls and the White Cube in Art Galleries at the beginning of the 20th Century, on the genealogy of the white cube
14:20-14:35 Response from Steven ten Thije to Charlotte Klonk, presenting an example of an exhibition in which colour was used as a tool to question the history of modern art
14:35-14:50 Break
14:50-15:20 Discussion with India Mahdavi about her practice as a colourist and designer, how she has worked with colours in different settings where art was present, and how colour and social media intersect
15:20-15:50 Presentation by Jessica Stockholder focused on colour in her artwork, and on the intersection between her work and context in relation to colour
15:50-16:05 Break
16:05-16:35 Presentation by Daniel Morgenthaler & Lynne Kouassi on their exhibition of Color that took place earlier this year at the Helmhaus Zürich, in which colours in the exhibition space were used as a lens to talk about questions of race
16:35-17:15 Panel Discussion with all the speakers, moderated by Laurie Cluitmans and Melanie Bühler
17:15-18:00 Drinks

Conference Day curated as part of the Rietveld Academy's Studium Generale program at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

How has contemporary Internet culture affected our emotional and cognitive capacities – our abilities to feel and think? Our minds, as Spinoza argued, operate first in the vague and blurry field of imagination. Here, feelings and thoughts converge before reason makes sense of them. This conference session that is titled after a book by Sianne Ngai, focuses on how networked culture can be perceived as an extended field of imagination – a sticky universe of emotions and ideas – and confronts the way in which digital platforms structure and organize this space.

Recent political developments, such as Brexit and the American presidential election, suggest that online culture has effectively created an environment of filter bubbles – affirmative echo chambers of like-minded people. Algorithms are the gatekeepers of these information streams with their very own agendas. Beyond these bubbles, it’s the surprising and emotionally potent that spread the most – the more outrageous the message, the more likely it is heard. If Google is knowledge, the brain that is picked the most, what does it mean when the search engine auto-completes the sentence ‘are Jews’ with the word ‘evil’ (as recently reported in the Guardian)? Has Google, with its self-proclaimed strategy of non-interference, actually paved the way for the normalization of prejudice, rendering the illegitimate legit?

Once a story or an image has nested itself within the popular imagination, it often doesn’t seem to matter if something turns out to be wrong. Apparently, then, feelings cannot be fought with facts. Accordingly, trolling and tweeting have become more effective strategies than official, less emotional and personalized modes of address. With fake news being spread and ‘alternative facts’ being promoted, anything is open for debate – it’s all just a matter of opinion. Has the kind of pluralism that Hal Foster diagnosed for the art of the ’80s (‘footloose in time, culture and metaphor’ – anything is permitted and nothing really means anything) become the reality of our information age?

What is happening to our brain – to the collective capacity to think, feel and imagine – in this setting? How do we think with and through the technologies that wire our brains together? How is truth afforded by technology and how does it intersect with the logic of a digital economy whose very currency – attention – is located in our brains? Where do the ugly feelings come from that have been harnessed so successfully in recent Internet-driven political debates? Have we entered a new age of propaganda, a new information era that radically retools the way we think and feel? What role does art and its related discourses (such as postmodernism and pluralism) play in this setting?

With:
Melanie Bühler, Hannah Barton, Jennifer Chan, Paul Feigelfeld, Daniel Keller, Elizabeth Orr, Özgür Kar and Timotheus Vermeulen

With Ché Zara Blomfield, Alessandro Ludovico, Yuri Pattison, Ami Clarke and Erica Scourti

Through readings and a panel discussion, the event addresses how publishing is affected by digitalisation and the distribution channels the internet provides, and will raise the question of how publishing can be understood as a process; as an expanded way of thinking that might permit us to consider more broadly current conditions in art production. As such it will particularly address text production through new technologies that test both the limits and co-evolution of humans and technology.

With Susanne Pfeffer, Lauren Boyle, Zachary Kaplan and Cécile B. Evans
In collaboration with Opening Times London

Recently, a number of initiatives have surfaced that are dedicated to presenting the work of artists in an online environment. Branching off into ‘the digital,’ institutions incorporate digital infrastructures as part of their institutional properties, launching digital residencies and giving away grants to support digital works. In collaboration with Opening Times, the Goethe-Institut London invites artists and organisations to discuss the question of how established formats of presenting art are translated into new digital settings and what consequences such a transition might have: How do artists create work in the setting of a digital residency and what are the concerns in presenting digital work? What are the material differences between on- and offline art spaces? Which distinctive norms and expectations are native to these spaces?

With:
Lauren Boyle, DIS Magazine, curator of the 9th Berlin Biennale 2016
Cécile B. Evans, artist, London
Zachary Kaplan, Assistant Director at Rhizome, New York
Susanne Pfeffer, Director Fridericianum, Kassel
Moderated by Filipa Ramos, Editor in Chief, art-agenda & Co-curator Vdrome

Opening Times will be present during the event through a take-over of the Goethe-Institut’s website, interacting live with the discussion.

With Christopher Kulendran Thomas and Andrew Norman Wilson
Panel discussion during Art Salon, Art Basel

The emergence of the internet has transformed the context for art – its currents and networks. The circulation of images has intensified. Categories and labels differentiate the flattening and accelerating streams and feeds of Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr, where images accumulate visual capital through proliferation rather than scarcity. How do these logics of dissemination affect the production of contemporary art and how is value negotiated through these processes of distribution? Departing from this current situation, this panel investigates the relation between contemporary artistic production and commerce. How do artists engage with corporate models, branded identities and entrepreneurial tactics? What is the difference between the art commodity and the commodity in general? And what are the political horizons of intensifying rather than opposing technologies of commerce to redirect rather than resist platforms of capitalization?

Series of 23 discussions in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Dublin, Glasgow, London and Stockholm

Lunch Bytes was a series of public discussions, which examine the consequences of the increasing ubiquity of digital networked technologies in relation to artistic practice. Each event was dedicated to a different topic and brought together artists, media scholars, designers, curators and intellectuals.

The European series was a project by the Goethe-Institut in Northwestern Europe. The events referred to four major themes: Medium; Structures and Textures; Society; Life. The project culminated in an international symposium at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in 2015.

Lunch Bytes was curated by Melanie Bühler, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut and the following partner institutions: Foam (Amsterdam), Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), Checkpoint Helsinki, Frame Visual Art Finland, Sinne, Pixelache (Helsinki), Nikolaj Kunsthal, Kunstforeningen GL STRAND (Kopenhagen), Arcadia Missa, Goldsmiths, University of London, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Royal Institute of Art, Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm).

Series of discussions, lectures and performances in Washington DC

Lunch Bytes examined the consequences of the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies in the art world by addressing the role of the internet in artistic practice from a wide range of perspectives. The series consists of events, each dedicated to a different topic and bringing together artists, media scholars, designers, curators, and intellectuals.

Curated by Melanie Bühler, Lunch Bytes was initiated in 2011 by the Goethe-Institut Washington, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Pro Helvetia in Washington DC. Additionally, Lunch Bytes collaborated with Art Basel Miami Beach to organize the talk "New Media, New Markets: Buying, Selling and Collecting Digital Art" in Miami Beach as well as with the Kunsthalle Basel on the talk "On Releasing, Distributing and Exhibiting Art Online" as part of Art Basel's Art Salon Program 2013.