The older principles of collection, research and display have become boring to the politicians who support the cultural industry; competition for the public increases constantly. Museums and Kunstahllen (exhibition halls) are to some extent in trouble and looking for new directions. If total biennalization is to be avoided, we must take up the challenges raised by reduced funding and waning political support and by increased demand for community representation and audience engagement. We must throw open the debate about the purpose and mission of a traditional museum or kunsthalle in a creative way. We might start to imagine a contemporary art institution not as a mausoleum, a showroom or even an entertainment centre, but as a fluid, open vector in which different groups, objects, individuals and information zones cross and divert one other.

In the present circumstances, cultural institutions are no longer sites for a debate about meaning between audience, artists and authorities but simply opportunities for product placement. This state of affairs has produced a fairly serious identity crisis for the museum, as well as crises directly related to political legitimacy and public funding. The questions I would like to pose are: what possibilities does this situation create? Can these institutions and the strategies for art’s encounters with viewers be enlivened by the post-1989 challenge? Can they address issues of economy, discourse and resistance directly? Can they create a dynamic two-way engagement within a singular world model?

But before I try to provide some pointers to answering these questions, I must first deal with a parallel but equal challenge to traditional exhibition-making stemming from the expectations of the viewers themselves. Within museums and exhibitions, we must all have noticed increasing demands from our audiences for involvement and accountability as well as a new self-consciousness about the roles they wish to play in various social situations. This development has been theorized by people such as Judith Butler, who suggests that gender is a performative act played out by each of us as individuals in the public space1 or Hannah Arendt, who claimed that the body is constructed in performance and is therefore politically charged in the ‘social’ sphere that Arendt sees as the middle ground between the public and private realms.2 All these theorists seem to point towards an expansion of the idea of performance and performativity beyond the theatrical and into social conditions. Today, these conditions are not confined to the ‘live’ experience in the way they might have been in the 1960s and ’70s. If the fictionalization of everyday life implied by Butler, Arendt and others challenged the autonomous realm of live theatre, then the growth in media forms and images from the 1990s onwards confused the idea of live and recorded as perceptually different categories. Certainly, the effect of video as a cheap, effective reproduction of moving images is in the process of changing performance much as photography changed the space for possibility in painting, while also theatricalizing society more generally. Each of us acts to some degree as though a camera were recording our every move and, particularly in public spaces such as a museum, we are probably right. We are, if you want a catchphrase, a society where ‘everyone is an actor’ – a development that parallels, rather than replaces, Beuys’s ‘everyone is an artist’.

Such an awareness provokes a number of responses, some of which can be seen in the way an increasing number of artists have grasped the possibilities of performance on video as a renewed site for experimentation. Others are much more located in a change of stance among art show visitors who, using terms such as ‘interactivity’ or ‘community art practice’ as well as models from reality TV and confessional talkshows, seek a more engaged role than the expected one of passive observer. That role is indeed a ‘role’, a part in a play for which the script is written as it is acted. If everyone is both artist and actor, then the previous hierarchical relationship between artists and audiences breaks down. We are individually much more complex than the museum seems to think, being at different times capable of playing the part of artist, viewer, curator, critic, conservative, radical, capitalist, activist, et cetera. Some of these roles conform to expectations, some provoke and some can be simply tried on for the pleasure of the change. It is the task of the museum as institution to rise to the challenge of this new audience rather than berating it for failing to take a studious but passive interest in its exhibitions.

These changes, both in the reduction of options within the politico-economic structure and towards more fluid conditions of reception, require a response from our cultural institutions, and especially from our museums and kunsthallen. In Western Europe, these largely publicly funded institutions are still rightly required to serve and create possibilities for the society in which they find themselves. How might they do that today? I believe that one approach is to take a lead from the fluidity that characterizes capitalism – performative identity-making – and that is also at the heart of technological change. A fluid institution would be a self-critical, changeable, uncertain but also an undoctrinaire place in which, within the bounds of the law, anything imaginable is possible. That imagination comes of course from artists, but also from the wide range of visitors and staff who together make up a cultural institution. We could, for example, try to provide the kind of terrain in which the audience feels liberated to try out different roles or identities, where the works of art shown trigger new possibilities in their imagination and the museum becomes an adult playground, though one by means of which these temporary roles can be connected back to the much more constrained possibilities of daily social life.

Of course, the fact of the architecture – location in a particular city – might appear to make this fluidity in many cases impossible, but I want to think more about temporal fluidity than spatial fluidity. In other words, how there might be moments in time when certain potentialities are released. These moments might coincide with both artists and visitors being invited to play roles that engage with one another and from that meeting spin off, again in time, to change opinions or result in actions that would otherwise not have occurred. It is the provision of the tools to create such moments of possibility to which our efforts should be directed. Optimistically, too, I think that discourses about capitalism, frozen by the changes of 1989, are beginning to melt. Certain artists and institutional practices can contribute to this change in no small way by providing scope for a vivisection of economic and social realities, alongside the role of the playground. I therefore propose a kunsthalle as a constantly mutating meeting place where questions can be posed, and as a laboratory where those questions can be investigated in public and private.

To make the argument a little clearer, I’d like briefly to suggest a few possible forms or modest proposals that such a place might develop – and now I will speak only about the kunsthalle, because the museum with its collection has many different problems that I find even more overwhelming. A kunsthalle organized along temporal lines would be many different things at different times, but there are perhaps some spatial or even intellectually fixed points around which the whole would have to turn.

A kunsthalle might strive to be:
1. A place to develop general social and individual creativity, where the older hierarchies are displaced by a generous definition of creative action and engagement. We could imagine the idea of ‘audience’ transformed into the idea of ‘Mitarbeiter’, or helpers, in the production and reception of the art, with works that might be community based but also have purchase on the international art world. Examples, ranging from Superflex’s ‘tenantspin’ web channel to Otto Berchem’s supermarket dating projects and Maria Eichhorn’s children’s playroom at the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart, are beginning to proliferate. Perhaps we could even begin to float the notion that artists, writers, viewers and the people who staff the institutions are on the same side, all of us trying valiantly to produce interesting, applicable meaning out of the process of engagement with art. In doing so, we are also dealing with the matter of how to effect change at the micro level.
2. A many chambered hall, or to quote Chris Dercon, a working Tower of Babel. A site for different types and orders of activity where the public and private blend. For instance, create and publicize a building where the more traditional showroom function is only one choice amongst many and where borrowings, again at different times, from the functions of other institutions becomes commonplace. No longer preoccupied with differentiating itself from other activities, from the library and the Internet, or from the community centre, the laboratory and the academy, the kunsthalle would then be a site of informed, intelligent and curious discourse. This would undoubtedly mean spending less of the already limited financial resources on exhibitions. It will be difficult to alter such priorities and, more worryingly, it might take money away from artistic production – but that may in any case be increasingly in the domain of the private sector. It certainly means that the kunsthalle will cease to be a Tues-Sun 10:00-18:00 place to go, that opening times and opportunities for access will be changed, that the doors will sometimes be closed, and that the kunsthalle will sometimes be open late or even, for short periods, move somewhere else altogether. These are changes that funding bodies and others will find hard to take but I believe they must be tried.
3. Finally I want to introduce the idea of ‘guerrilla programmes’, derived from Robert Goodman’s writings in the early 1970s about ‘guerrilla architecture’ as informal, provisional structures that oppose the ordered solutions of the civic planners. ‘Guerrilla programmes’ would also be provisional and informal. They would partly stem from a notion that everything can and should be temporary, combined with a self-critical, slightly distanced relationship to its own activity on the part of the institution’s staff, management and ‘Mitarbeiter’. An institution can enable such internal and external criticism by choosing to define itself as a test site for different positions rather than adopting a necessarily authoritative point of view. Secondly, we might strive in our ‘guerrilla programmes’ to create a certain atmosphere, albeit hard at present to define, in which the role-playing visitor/artist/politician et cetera has a certain self-conscious awareness of the provisional and changeable nature of his or her own role. Building on that, we can emphasize that the perhaps very clear and singular argument or aesthetic experience in an exhibition or project is itself provisional, subject to change, a temporary moment which can be interrogated and remade by the viewer.

Of course, much of this will be hard to convey quickly to a casual visitor. It requires conditions that encourage an active imaginative response and the ‘mass-ness’ of mass media, its easy consumption and huge promotional machinery, makes this extremely difficult. The type of programme I describe will probably, at least initially, only draw in a limited group. The question is, does that invalidate the programme? Does the lack of a large audience detract from ideas about playing with and on behalf of the audience itself? In fact, it might even be an advantage in certain circumstances – ones in which the audience feels privileged to be admitted to a special experience. The effort of finding your way to a kunsthalle, the time needed to get involved in the way I describe might lead to exactly the kind of liberating moments of possibility art craves. Cultural institutions could pride themselves on trying to attract visitors using quite different methods from those of consumer marketeers. I want to believe such optimistic responses to our multiple crises are possible, although I am confident these will not last.

Charles Esche (b.1962) is a curator and writer based in Copenhagen. He is an editor of the art journal AFTERALL and, since 2001, Director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö.
1. ‘Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler’, interview by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, London, 1993. Published in Radical Philosophy no. 67, London, summer 1994.
2. B. Honig ‘Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity’ in: Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, New York (Routledge) 1992, pp. 215-235.