By Ingrid Commandeur Metropolis M, magazine about contemporary art, no.6 2007

Many people were surprised by her appointment: Anna Tilroe is the artistic director of the tenth Sonsbeek exhibition which will be taking place in the summer of 2008. After years in which successive curators sought a confrontation with public space in the widest sense of the word, Tilroe has decided to have the entire exhibition take place in the park again. But there will be an attempt to form a relationship with the city: the exhibition will be opened with a procession of all the exhibited works.

 

For many years Anna Tilroe's sharp critiques of Dutch exhibition practices were published in the newspaper NRC Handelsblad. She reproached curators for merely concerning themselves with art history, art fashions and the artist's point of view. ‘Nobody dares to relate art to social life or to integrate it into the cultural debate', she wrote in the newspaper a few years ago. That creates expectations, now that the critic has herself become a curator. Why has she become artistic director of Sonsbeek 2008?

 

Anna Tilroe: ‘The Arnhem City Council invited me to come up with a concept for Sonsbeek. It took me a long time to decide whether I should accept the invitation. But in the end I agreed and wrote a concept that was received with enthousiasm. And then I was suddenly curator of Sonsbeek. When I think about it, it's still unreal. My outlook remains very much formed by criticism - that's my background. Looking back at my book Het blinkende stof. Op zoek naar een nieuwe visie (2002) (Glittering Dust, in search of a new vision), I found that it consisted largely of questions. It was time to look for answers. The concept for Sonsbeek 2008 is not based on a question, however, but on a statement. The quest for a new vision is something that continues, it's part of me.'

 

In Het blinkende stof you write, ‘Let's unashamedly maintain that art is necessary because we are unintelligible to ourselves. How this art expresses itself has to do with time, with socio-political and economic developments. But what it expresses is timeless and a ceaseless source of reflection and discussion about what we see as noble-minded, and what not.' Do you mean with ‘noble-minded' the same as Grandeur, the title and theme of the exhibition?

 

Tilroe: ‘The statement that I want to make with the theme of "grandeur" is that if an individual wants a future for himself he has to strive to transcend his own everyday limitations. The same goes for a society. I'm trying to raise an issue that I think is crucial in Western society today, namely the search for a new ethics. I'm a great fan of the French philosopher Alain Badiou who occupies an interesting philosophical position in this respect, and I want to reflect upon this within the framework of an exhibition.'

 

Can you be more specific? Are we supposed to see ‘grandeur' as an aim worth striving for?

 

Tilroe: ‘I wouldn't go so far as to call it an aim. I'm concerned about the striving in itself, as this forces you to think about the human condition. Modernity is a development that is very much focussed on achieving freedom for the individual, free of religion. The whole development of the twentieth century can be seen in that framework, with the 1970s as the climax. In my view we are now coming up against the limits of that striving for unbridled freedom. There are limits to what people accept of each other, and this then leads to a discussion about ethics: what is allowed and what isn't? Our society is in a learning process as far as that is concerned: on the basis of what is not possible, we look for what is possible, without losing the existing achievements. The big danger right now has to do with the feeling of discontent that is prevalent in society about how things should be. This is seized upon by religious people. They offer a ready-made package, you just have to adopt it. If you don't watch out, you end up with a repressive climate with nothing to oppose it. The statement I'm making is that we always have one remedy, and that is art. What you find in art is sharpness, inventiveness, freedom and a wide range of possibilities. In that respect I am a true believer.'

 

Alain Badiou argues that art is not without obligations, but a domain that generates new and important truths. There are, he says, four domains in which certain ‘truth procedures' occur: politics, love, science and art. For this reason, art has an educational and ethical task. You believe in this, too, but is it not a naive thought in today's neo-liberal economy, in which the world of art is largely determined by the art market?

 

Tilroe: ‘The international art world hangs together through mutual connections and these are not free of big commercial interests. The art world is completely sick, it is nothing but an art market. I'll just have to see how I can keep aloof from this. But what the market has to offer is not everything. I'm trying to resist this. I recognise its dominance, to be sure, but there's more. There are enough artists who succeed in keeping their distance from the art market.'

 

You've decided to display the works of art in the Sonsbeek Park. In addition, all the works will be borne in a procession through the city at the opening of the exhibition. Where does this plan come from?

 

Tilroe: ‘I was not very enthusiastic about the concept of the last two Sonsbeek exhibitions, where the art was spread out across the city. Visual art simply cannot compete with what happens in the street. It seemed to me better to focus once again on the park. Artists like to install their work there and you can set out an interesting route. I got the idea of a procession from seeing photographs of a procession in Japan. It looked like an enormous comic scrip, with lights, dragons and warriors that were carried by a whole load of people. I realised then that the procession is not only connected with the crucifix, but that the custom embraces a much broader spectrum, including art itself. The Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem is going to devote an exhibition to the procession in art.'

 

The concept of a procession goes back to religious art, where the meaning of images was connected with the cult, the customs of a community. With the advent of modernity this social function of art has totally changed. What does it mean to organise a procession now, wouldn't it just become a superficial event?

 

Tilroe: ‘The reason I called it a procession is that I wanted to get away from the idea of a spectacle - it's not a parade or a carnival. For me, a procession is something that demands a considerable effort. It really demands something of someone to take part in it. I've nothing against an event in itself, you could define an event as a break-through. The art is literally carried by various groups in society, which we've called bearer guilds. They display the art to the public: look, this is art, make of it what you like but we've engaged ourselves with it. The educational nature of this undertaking, the information they receive about the work of art and the encounter between the bearer guild and the artist are important here. The guilds have to know what they are carrying, what they are engaging with. So far there are several initiatives for bearer guilds, consisting for example of allotment gardeners, policemen, and cultural bureaucrats. '

 

The list of artists has not yet been made public, but can you say something about how the theme of Grandeur is reflected in your selection of artists?

 

Tilroe: ‘For me, the idea of utopian desire is preeminently represented by the work of Tomas Saraceno. But the phenomena we are currently seeing of people giving shape to their longing for community spirit by falling back on history, inventing things and presenting them, is also an aspect of Grandeur. One artist who is interested in this is Brody Condon. I had intense discussions with him about the theme and we arrived at a film like The Fightclub which is actually one big initiation ritual for boys who want to be men but no longer know how to achieve that and therefore fall back on something very basic. In this we see again the longing for rituals. But there's also an artist taking part who's purely concerned with art: Gerhard Merz. The piece he's contributing is about art but it comes across with a real bang! As far as that is concerned, I'm not trying to push aside the self-examination of art in the 20th century, since that too was based on a strong utopian desire. More generally, I can say that I'm not limiting myself to the Western art world. And this has to do with the fact that I feel we're imprisoned in an anti-tradition, whereas in other cultures this seems to be much less the case. There are interesting positions in between and I would like to include these as well.'

 

To conclude, isn't it so that the wish to unite art and life remains an insatiable desire? In the Netherlands we're plagued by a real boom in social art projects, and didn't you also once say that artist themselves have almost nothing to contribute since what reigns is the curator's concept?

 

Tilroe: ‘I agree, but my exhibition is different. It's not art in the neighbourhood, it's a celebration of art. Works of art are special; I would only go so along to a certain extent with the idea that ‘art is life'. I can already anticipate the criticism: I'm making art into a fetish, objectifying it, making art something sacred. But I think you have to keep trying to rescue art from the flows of capital that it has now become part of, and from Richard Florida's notion of the Creative Industry. The work of art is being celebrated in Grandeur not because it is an expensive object, not because it is the plaything of the elite, not because it is something that has a sacred status. But because it represents the human imagination.'