From Capital to Enthusiasm

From Capital to Enthusiasm: towards an exhibitionary practice is a chapter in Exhibition Experiments edited by Sharon Mcdonald and Paul Basu. The book explores experiments with display and museological form that challenge our understanding - and experience of - museums. The following text is a draft, without illustrations and excludes footnotes. You can download the introduction from Experiments.pdf or buy the whole publication from Blackwell

From Capital to Enthusiasm: towards an exhibitionary practice

As artists we have been collaborating together since 1995, and we in turn have worked with many curators, academics, historians, archivists, gallerists, people with technical expertise, enthusiasts, collectors, and many, many others. During this time, we have moved away from the habitual aesthetic appearance of art and its exhibition, and even from the production of autonomous objects as art – and closer to a collaborative, or research driven way of practicing. And, echoing wider cultural shifts, we’ve turned our attention from sites of art production – the studio – to the spaces of distribution and consumption – the gallery and museum.

We have been interested in thinking about, and working alongside many of the organisations that choreograph the exchange of values between art and its publics. We have worked with various Galleries –public and private-, Museums, Art Schools, publishers and broadcasters. And when you work with these institutions and their exhibitionary technologies - of collection, installation and display, producing publications, catalogues and promotional material, their educational projects and remit, writing wall texts, object-labels, audio tours and gallery guides, and so on - you become aware that these technologies can be turned upon any object, image, artist, maker, experience, city, country or nation. These powerful exhibitionary technologies are the means of producing, presenting and disseminating the work of the work of art.

The exhibitionary technologies of art are also diffusing into wider economies of display; economies animated by the movement of images, information, knowledge, value, people, goodwill, loyalty and trust. These forces, which have traditionally been misrecognised as outside of finance and within the realm of culture, are now central to our ‘new’ financial economies convened around the slippery exchanges of creativity, knowledge, Intellectual property regimes and capital. So we have also been interested in the spaces where art, through exhibition, dissolves into public policy and social management, into promotion, sponsorship and investment, into products, advertising, and lifestyle choices; which has caused us to initiate projects with department stores, with advertising agencies, archives, with independent commissioning agencies and corporations.

Each project has resulted in a range of different outcomes, appropriate to the projects location. For example, we have made exhibitions with collections of paintings, sculpture, fine furniture, ceramics, and miscellaneous objects like Free Trade (2003) at the Manchester Art Gallery, which enabled us to explore the entanglements of art and emerging 19th century capitalism through our rediscovery of the Beatson Blair Bequest; and Use Value (2002) an installation replaying sounds of the social exchanges, the uses of things –eating, cooking, drinking and the like- within the pin-drop quiet of one of the largest exhibitions of ceramics in the world, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. We have researched and produced books like The Value of Things (2001) which explored via the British Museum and Selfridges department Store the parallel ideological and exhibitionary history of the public museum and the department store. And we have built collections and exhibitions -often with amateur material previously excluded from ‘official’ cultural institutions- like Not Hansard (2000) and Enthusiasts (2004).

We have tried to engage with many of the technologies, that cultural institutions use to designate and mediate art, and the increasingly devolving experience of art, to their public. In particular, we have explored the conventions of exhibition, and attempted to practice with these conventions –they become our media- rather than be subject to them.

To this end we increasingly use research as a means of identifying the location of our artwork, as well as any potential exhibitionary form this artwork might take. For us, research or fieldwork has replaced ‘site specificity’ as a means of designating our engagement as artists. Because research incorporates the recognition that the ‘exhibition’ itself, often consists of interlocking yet distributed fields of aesthetics, knowledge, promotion, social practices and economic forces. The exhibition is discursively formed, through our act of engagement; it does not pre-exist as an ‘empty’ location, waiting to be filled. We have sought to vividly re-animate the practices exhibition; where our artworks are no longer viewed as points of origin, founded on ‘individual’ creativity, or of termination, housed in museum sand galleries or their stores, but as nodes in networks of social exchange. What we have been interested in developing is a heightened sensitivity to the idea of an exhibitionary context in which the work of the work of art is activated; to enable us to reflect upon the material and immaterial conditions in which our practice as artists is engaged, and made legible.

Capital

As a more concrete example, we’ll describe a project developed at Tate Modern in London that became known as Capital, which was exhibited from May-October 2001. We were commissioned by senior curator Francis Morris to propose a pre-opening project, which means we started researching eighteen months before the Tate opened in 2000. We were invited to think about the Tate and its immediate environment; its geographical location, or its social and cultural environment in Southwark, the City and more generally London.

The more we researched Tate, and learnt more about its ambition and power, the different departments and components: St Ives, Tate Liverpool, Britain and Modern, the vast stores in high-security but non- descript industrial buildings in south London, the archive of the artworld that it is buying from artists, galleries and other institutions, the best art library in Britain, huge conservation department, vast art handling, aggressive publicity and development, and its huge educational ambition – from working with teachers and schools, to conferences with internationally renowned academics, writers, historians, theorists and artists. The practice of exhibition, the most public face of Tate, is a mere sliver of its activities. With its huge cultural ambition and image in the public consciousness, we began to consider the Tate, in some ways a central bank; a central bank in a different kind of economy, a symbolic economy. Something perhaps, like the Bank of England.

The Bank

Over a year before the project was due to open, we approached the Bank of England with the vague idea about some sort of collaboration with the Tate through us. We began to research what the Bank of England does, and a little of the history of banking.

The Bank of England is the banker to the whole British financial system and also plays a major role in structuring global monetary relations. This major role is essentially as the ‘lender of last resort’. Which means the Bank will decide to rescue an ailing financial institution if its economists fear a systemic collapse, or a catastrophic loss of confidence in the whole British or world financial system. The role as ‘lender of last resort’ gives the Bank the authority to guarantee the necessary trust and confidence, to secure the various interlocking domestic, foreign commodity and financial markets. And to cut a very long and complicated story short it regulates or distributes trust and confidence through these various economies, by managing the availability and price of debt. Effectively it adjusts the cost of borrowing to accelerate or decelerate the flow of capital debt into the markets, with cuts or raises in interest rates. And this debt, this black hole, this lack that the Bank manages the price of, is principally the governments.

'Managing the price of government debt' was the function that founded the bank in 1694. William of Orange and Queen Mary jointly ascended the throne of England in 1689 they needed cash money to continue the war with France in William’s homeland of the Netherlands. The government Exchequer declined, so a group of people got together to form a joint-stock company and on-leant money to the king in return for the loan with interest, but also (eventually) for a royal charter to enable the fledgling company to issue paper notes. The Bank, later to become the Bank of England is founded upon a debt, and the continuation of this debt, or the continuation of the repayment of this debt, is the motor of our present domestic and international financial economies. Our whole global financial structure is founded upon debt repayments.

Linked to the cost of the loan to the king, was the Bank’s demand to issue notes "paper money" in return for a Royal Charter. Previously all value found its form, as, or in relationship to gold. Coin for instance would embody the actual value in material, as that depicted on its face. These new paper notes, had little intrinsic value but were contractual agreements against which objects or services could be bought or sold for the value represented. Of course these paper promises were backed by gold in the vaults. The ”I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds” printed –and still printed- on British paper notes implied that you could present the note at the bank at retrieve your ten pounds of gold. This link between gold-as-value and its paper representation was slowly augmented by the Bank, through using different forms of government securities against which notes could be issued. Tax receipts, revenues on land or commercial contracts, stocks of merchandise, or even potential stocks of merchandise, were to become acceptable forms of security. The Bank began issuing, to its scandalized customers imaginary money, notes that were backed by other paper promises to pay, sell or loan services, debts, trades and obligation at some future time or place. These new obligations against which imaginary money’ could be advanced speeded up and expanded the economy at an extraordinary rate, to all intents and purposes it “multiplied the Effect of our coined Money”

The Bank initiated a ‘Fiduciary issue’, it’s a term to denominate paper money in circulation which is no longer backed by bullion in the vaults. Essentially money is backed by a collective act of faith and obligation. The Bank was, and is, a more symbolic institution than we ever realized. We also became conscious, that the dematerialization of value from gold to paper promises was continuing out into new instruments and technologies. The current scale of the five principle markets that trade currency, bonds, stock, derivatives and commodities, are staggering. For example the turnover on the currency markets alone are estimated at 1trillion dollars a day, which means that in two months the volume of trade dwarfs the annual turnover from manufacturing and retail of the entire planet. Immaterial exchanges of value dwarf the physical trade of goods and capital, even as our own financial dealings dissolve into the swipe of plastic, or the click of a mouse.

And yet, ironically, the dematerialization of financial value has accelerated the penetration of the ‘economic’ into all aspects of contemporary life. Into healthcare, education, transportation, and broadcasting which –in Britain at least- were previously state funded through collective ‘welfare’ strategies and so protected from the vagaries of the ‘market’. Values expressed as money haunt everything; a punch line in a popular TV advert suggests ‘we are all bank managers now’ and another that ‘we are all fluent in finance’. So, as the signs for financial value become increasingly vast but immaterial, does the central Bank’s role as guarantor grow inversely to compensate?

The Tate

On the other side of the same coin/note, would it be possible to situate the Tate - through its ambition and constant expansion- as the principle institution in a parallel ‘symbolic’ economy.

Like the Bank, Tate connects with a vast network of other exhibitionary institutions and agencies; from museums, galleries, curators, collectors, dealers, to various funding and sponsoring bodies both nationally and internationally, that make up the global economy of art. Does the Tate guarantee the integrity and value of the artworks, the objects, images and knowledge it collects, exhibits, stores and distributes within this economy? And, in a close parallel with a central bank, is its basic currency becoming increasingly insubstantial, and difficult to represent? Artworks and images are dissolving into digital media, fieldwork and activism; and perhaps this process is further accelerated as ‘aesthetic experience’ dissolves beyond the regulated symbolic economy, out into the culture of promotion, sponsorship, branding, Cities of Culture status, economic regeneration, advertising and marketing. Like the Unilever Turbine hall commission at Tate Modern, Egg the online banks ‘live art’ sponsorship at Tate Modern, BT sponsors the Tate website and online commissions, Tate have issued a range of paints through DIY superstores, and so on, and so on.

Clearly, values expressed through image and information haunt everything. As the signs of aesthetic value become increasingly immaterial, does the Museum’s role as regulator and guarantor grow inversely to compensate?

If the Tate and the Bank have more similarities than differences, there is a major structural difference. The Tate was founded by a gift from Sir Henry Tate, in 1887. From a family of grocers, Sir Henry bought the rights to refine sugar and manufacture sugar cubes, and like many 19th Century industrialists made so much money he did not know what to do with it; he founded hospitals, Colleges, Libraries, and collected works of art. His collection of modern British art was presented to the nation via parliament as he neared the end of his life, but parliament initially refused. Where would we house the collection? So finally Sir Henry also donated the funds to build a new gallery at millbank –now Tate Britain- on the Thames, and although it was officially called the Gallery of British Art it inevitably took its founders name.

You will remember that the Bank was founded on a debt incurred by the King in 1694.

The Gift

Most people are aware, that the contested idea of the gift has been a central theme in anthropology since Marcel Mauss’s seminal publication The Gift in 1950, and more recently its influence has been profound in other social sciences. Mauss’ work on the gift proposes an economy outside or alongside of the calculations encouraged by the purely financial –the gift economy predates money and yet has not been erased by its presence. Receiving a gift triggers the obligation to reciprocate; the counter gift necessitates a return, and so on, endlessly. We could imagine an economy without apparent origin, and therefore we are all, already within networks of gift and debt. Giving, and the gifts obligation of an indebted return, assures and realizes all manner of social relationships. Through the substitution of linear or cyclical reciprocity for a notion of a collective good – producing or receiving academic knowledge for example - its possible to connect economies of the gift to theories of community. Through anonymous contributions and withdrawals to and from a collective ‘good’ – sometimes characterized as a ‘cooking pot’ model - individuals become invested in and therefore beholden to communal projects. Perhaps here lies the traditional root of nation states through social welfare projects that we mentioned earlier, like health care and education, or culture supported through public broadcasting, or ‘free’ access to Museums and Galleries. Gifting strengthens the interconnectedness of friendships, families, communities, societies and even nations, and whereas money exchange cancels obligations between people, the gift binds.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has reworked the anthropological notion of the gift, by emphasizing the gift as a gesture of ‘bad faith’, or suffused with ‘misrecognition’. Bourdieu suggests that one of the astonishing characteristics of the gift, is our ability to pretend that it’s a disinterested gesture, replete with charity; while actually it’s a gesture of power, domination and full of indebtedness. If the gift is surrounded by social obligations of guilt – for not reciprocating appropriately- of indebtedness and obligation, and that these are contractual agreements which cannot be recognized as such. An economy which is founded on gifting is based on the misrecognition of the financial value, or the social and cultural force that the gift entails. It’s an un-economic economy; a symbolic economy.

Clearly the Tate and virtually all other public institutions of exhibition - museums and galleries- are completely indebted to private, public and corporate gifting; most public collections are the result of private gifts of art, and many public institutions rely on financial gifts to meet exhibition and running costs. These patterns of gifting bind cultural institutions into economic networks of obligation and indebtedness, obscured from public scrutiny. And this in itself is further complicated by the enormous growth in sponsorship: exchanges where some of the repayments on the apparent gift are specified - my logo on your publicity - but others as with the true gift are left unspecified.

The Exhibition

All of the above is by way of preparation, evidence of the research that simultaneously enables us to build a context for, and gives form to the exhibition encounter itself. For Capital we negotiated three ‘outcomes’ with both the Bank and the Tate, as a way of activating differing levels of engagement between the institution and its audience. They comprised a gift, a publication, and a seminar series

The exhibition was inaugurated and spectacularly detonated through the issue of a gift, a beautiful limited edition, double-sided print. The print consists of an image of a silver spoon borrowed from the banks ceremonial service and bearing the banks logo, Britannia. It was taken to the Tate and photographed and therefore copyrighted by the Tate’s in-house photographers; therefore nether the asset or the image belonged to us. The print was double sided, the handle with crest on one side – denoting the action of giving, and the bowl of the spoon the other- suggesting receiving. We negotiated to install Capital -it consisted of framed versions of the print, a wall text, a short film, and some contextual reading matter – in the reading room at Tate Modern, a room with picture windows that overlooks the city of London itself, and in the Bank of England Museum

In the Reading Point on Level 5 West at Tate Modern and in the Bank of England Museum, at unspecified times during the day a visitor might be approached by a gallery or museum official. The official introduced themselves to the visitor, and then accompanied by the phrase This is for you gave away the beautifully wrapped, special limited edition print. Astonished visitors wondered Why me? or What’s this? Other visitors, looking-on and not so lucky wondered Why not me? And the gift-giver themselves felt beholden to explain what they were doing, or what they thought they were doing, and what was happening. Through such a simple gesture, disinterested exhibition behavior - the slow pan along gallery walls, or around vitrines - was transformed into an emotional exchange. Curators, administrators, maintenance people, sales staff and others –the social infrastructure of any exhibition, gallery or museum - who nominated themselves as gift givers entered into a discussion with their visitors as to the nature of their exchange, and what was being exhibited. Where past debts being repaid through the gift, or new debts incurred?

And it’s here in the exhibitionary encounter between a representative of the museum and the visitor that the work of the work of art is negotiated. Through the introduction of the gift, we attempted to insert a moment of critical reflection into the habitual flow of things. Through a heightened attention to the chains of debt, generosity and obligation, what was simultaneously being enacted, and exhibited was the social contract that generates both culture and finance. Because it is clear, that as debt drives our financial systems, the gift is at the heart of our cultural economies. Our gesture of authorizing the giving of the gift, was using the public money which funded our project, and the Tate itself and giving it back - with interest? - to the previously anonymous visitor, the public tax payer who invisibly supports culture and its institutions. To those whose contributions are unaccounted for, because their contributions are not the ‘magnificence of Gifting’ of donations, gifts, bequests or sponsorship of the wealthy and famous, but the invisible support of anonymous investment. It was our, and the Tate and Banks return to our audience for their generosity.

Of course we are aware that artists ‘commissions’ have become part of the promotional and funding imperative of any public institution of exhibition, particularly driven by instrumental notions ‘outreach’, access and community. Artists have to be aware of the contradictions and obligations that they are entering into, in all the circumstance when there is a chance to ‘exhibit’ – our intention is to reveal what has been repressed for so long, and to try and make those obligations apparent.

The second exhibitionary encounter, and the second intervention into distributive networks was a publication that created a material and theoretical context from which the issue of the gift could be located, and the gesture of giving and the reciprocal debt understood. The book contains back-stage photographs of the Bank and Tate taken by us throughout our research, complemented by previously unpublished archival material and a ‘sketch’ history of both institutions. Inside this frame we commissioned three essays, by geographer Prof Nigel Thrift , anthropologist Prof Marilyn Strathern and political philosopher Prof Jeremy Valentine. The twin themes of the gift and debt were located as the heart of the respective institutions, and the gesture of the gift revealed as the core of the Capital itself.

The publication gathered much of the research, yet also offered another space of engagement with a different audience through exhibition. Whereas the gift could not be triggered by the receiver, the book required an active purchase, as did the third exhibitionary encounter, a series of seminars on core themes that seemed essential for any economy –either symbolic of financial, that of Gift, Economy and Trust. Uunfolding over three Sunday afternoons, curated in collaboration with Jeremy Valentine the seminars were chaired by academic Paul Hirst and lasted for three hours. Our intention was that there should be short presentations, a glass of wine, and then plenty of time for discussion and exchange. The seminar was turned, like the practice of exhibition itself through the issue of the gift, into a space of creative production, and not the habitual display of knowledge; the extraordinary seminars are archived on the Tate website.

Our intention with Capital, through the issue of the gift, and by extension to all those individuals that enter into its orbit -through rumor, publicity, the seminar series or the book, or even this text was to initiate an engagement with the social imagination. Capital, as an artwork exists in all the interstices of exhibition, it set in motion a series of future encounters, debts, punctuations and exchanges. And although the artwork is authorized and guaranteed by the Tate and Bank, it can no longer be contained or regulated by the institutions, the artwork has entered into a rich and varied exhibitionary life.

Enthusiasm

Exhausted after a series of projects [Capital (2001), Use Value (2001) Free Trade (2003)], that required endless negotiation with institutions of collection and exhibition, in 2002 we had a chance encounter with Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s first popular feature film Amator (Film Buff) from 1979. The main character in the film is a leading member of a factory based amateur film club. Intrigued as to whether such clubs and film-makers existed, we began a few speculative research trips in the summer of 2002 into the existence and remnants of amateur film clubs in socialist Poland.

There has been a spectacular transfiguration of Polish political and cultural life since the introduction of the market economy in 1989. It is as if Poland has played out in a lapsed-time film style, the economic and cultural changes of ‘western’ Europe. Fifty years of social evolution –from a manufacturing to a service economy - has been compressed into just over ten years. Poland is a crystallization of the forces at play in the rest of Europe; it projects a service driven, consumer led future, while content to forget its industrial past, and hide its manufacturing present. And yet, all the former state owned industries - for example those generating power, refining steel or producing chemicals - play a central role in contemporary economic and cultural life. Clearly industry manufactures the goods and energy necessary to generate our material lives, and yet has simultaneously structured our experiences into ‘productive’ labour, and un-productive ‘leisure’ time; the space of culture. Although in Poland even before the economic changes, ‘leisure’ was itself organized through factory-sponsored clubs, various associations, sports facilities and even state holiday schemes.

Out of this regulated network, perhaps the most popular clubs were those that encouraged the production of amateur film. With 16mm film stock, cameras and editing tables supplied by the factory/state, a large number of clubs were created throughout Poland from 1950’s onwards. By the late 1960’s there were almost 300 clubs in existence. Out of this growing network, and in a mirror reflection of the professional media, film competitions evolved, prizes awarded, and festivals were organized on a local, regional, and eventually national and international level.

The passions of the amateur, enthusiast or hobbyist often reveal a range of interests and experiences generally invisible amongst the breathless flow of the State sponsored, or professionally mediated. The enthusiast is often working outside ‘official’ culture and its encouragements, frequently adopting a counter-cultural tone of tactical resistance and criticism. Many of the qualities ascribed to contemporary art practice……………

During our trips to Poland we became aware that most of the factories that housed film clubs had closed, or the clubs themselves disbanded. With help, we found a few former club members who were still active, they in turn gave us addresses and telephone numbers of other members and clubs. We began to criss-cross the country, visiting people’s houses, extant clubs and community centres, and with the aid of a portable editing device watched hundreds of films.

It became apparent to us that the film club enthusiasts were inverting the familiar logic of work and leisure, through becoming truly productive when pursuing their passion – film making - and using work for their own rather than the factory or states intentions. Perhaps the enthusiast has the same relationship to official cultural production, as the gift to financial economies? These grey areas, between work and leisure are clearly blurring in our contemporary economies driven by exchanges of signs, information, experiences and capital. Cultural production, that which was once marginal to the refreshment of capital; either luxurious to the strictly financial - as in the example of Fine Art- or outside the reach of profit - as in the practices of the enthusiast or amateur- has become central to ‘creative industries’ and the ‘new’ economies. In these ‘new’ economies the artist or enthusiast is an ideal employee; astonishingly self-motivated, endlessly creative, flexibile, enthusiastic, resourceful and poorly financially rewarded. So these are some of the themes we began to develop, using the culture of amateur film-making to think through and explore a shift from enthusiasm being a site of resistance to ‘official culture’, to the very source of the refreshment of contemporary capital.

As we tracked down the films and their makers we were astonished by their ambition, theses were not standard ‘amateur’ films of family landmarks, like births, weddings and holidays, but an aspiration to cinema. We saw extraordinary films that ranged from two-minute animations, wicked satires, to short ‘experimental’ and ‘abstract’ films, from documentaries on family, village, city or factory life; to historical dramas and ambitious features with great emotional gravity. There is an astonishing range of material, beautifully crafted -because film stock was precious- and largely forgotten, or more accurately doubly-repressed. Doubly-repressed because the films are tinged with an ideological past incompatible with the ideological present, and because of their ‘amateur’ status they exist below the consciousness of ‘official’ cultural institutions of exhibition - Museums and archives

As a result of our research into the films, their makers and clubs, we found a huge selection of forgotten film, usually in people’s houses, and sometimes literally under their beds. In 2003, joined by curator Lukasz Ronduda at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw we embarked on cleaning, restoring and digitizing as much material as we could find money to support.

Exhibition

As we worked on restoration and digitization, we began to develop ideas for a new project, a means of exploring enthusiasm through exhibition. We were aware of, and wanted to avoid the legacy of artists use of found-film footage, where the film material is habitually stripped of its context and appropriated as the artists property. Through discussion, we realized our need to construct a social, material and conceptual context in which the films could be situated, while all the time being wary of falling into nostalgia.

Almost two years after the research began, the project was first made public in an exhibition entitled Enthusiasts curated by Lukasz Ronduda at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw in June 2004. The exhibition comprised; a compilation of official newsreels, a reconstructed interior of a film club-house, a selection of films curated into three hour-long film programmes, each presented in a ‘cinema’ exhibition environment, a collection of festival posters, and an Archive Lounge of films found but not screened.

The first exhibitionary encounter for the visitor was a room screening Polska Kronika Filmowa. These are short official state sponsored films which previewed in cinemas before the main feature, and later on television. The films glorify the productivity of the former communist state; its factories, their workers, material output, state festivals, shopping, cultural events, etc; the films create an introductory ground against which the Enthusiasts films themselves could be appreciated.

The second exhibitionary encounter was through a re-construction of a fictional film club. Many of the film-clubs we visited during our research were marvelously evocative; they caught and held the traces of the social and creative history of the members and the films they made. The clubs were usually stuffed with framed photographs, printed film stills, caricatures, posters, certificates, medals, prizes and trophies from film festivals, cupboards stacked with of unwanted film reels and video cassettes, redundant projectors, old cameras and recording equipment, film editing desks and chemicals, homemade developing tanks and film dryers, tea and coffee making equipment, a fridge, a coat-stand, odd chairs, salvaged furniture, junk and even rubbish. Our installation of a ‘club-house’ - created from materials borrowed from club-members, scavenged, or bought at flea markets in Warsaw, was inspired by ethnographic museum room-tableau. A monitor and VHS deck in the club-house replayed films by club-members documenting club ‘trips’ and holidays, special events, the process of filmmaking, meetings and festivals. Through inserting loops of self-representation within the fictional ‘club’, we tried to ensure the collaborative and social nature of the filmmaking process remained to the fore. While at the same time enabling the ‘club’ to be an actual social space for the exhibition visitor; the club-house became the hub of the exhibition, mirroring its status in the culture of amateur film-making.

On our research trips we watched hundreds of films, in many extraordinary circumstances, often with former club members present. And we became wary of imposing our preferences and taste on the richness of the films themselves, we tried to become sensitive to their makers enthusiasms and hopes. What eventually evolved from screenings and discussions were three porus themes; themes of Love, Longing and Labour. This enabled us to select and curate the films for exhibition into three hour-long film programmes, effectively to edit three hour long films; although in contrast to the conventions of artists ’found-footage’ the films were complete, with original music and fully credited. Our emergent themes seemed better able to curate the films into comprehension than the arbitrary violence performed by the genres usually deployed; like feature, documentary, or animation.

We had found a means of giving an exhibitionary context to the films and their production, but how should a cinema of enthusiasm be represented in a gallery?

Too often we have seen films and the culture of cinema lazily installed for exhibition. Films are routinely digitalized, and projected onto a wall, in a black box installed inside the gallery with nowhere to sit, no programme, no running time, nothing. We were determined to complement the film-makers cinematic aspirations. We worked with architects Peter Thomas and Cathy de Toit of 51% studio for architecture to find a form of exhibition that could simultaneously express the gap between the humble club and the cinematic desires of the members. What evolved were three beautiful, lush, sensuously curved, vibrantly coloured, five-meter tall, velvet-curtained cinema spaces. Each cinema had appropriate chairs where visitors would feel comfortable, a screen, soft low-level lighting and a printed programme with film-notes and running times. Through the programme we wanted to hand control of the routes through the elements and spaces of the exhibition back to the visitors themselves. They could sit back and luxuriate in a particular cinema watching the whole programme, or wander from screen to screen mixing their own film selection. As with Capital, the space of the Enthusiasts exhibition became a space of creative production for visitors, mirroring the collaborative practices employed by the amateur film-makers themselves.

In the cinema entitled Longing we screened films of personal, political, and sexual, love, loss and longing; we explored themes of alienation, ecological anxieties, a fear of war and violence, and a terrible longing to be elsewhere. In Love the films reflected on the, joy, banality and celebration of an ‘everyday’ love of life; with themes of humor and camaraderie, of families, parties, passion and sex as a radical transgression of the expected. In Labour the films traced the beauty, banality, discipline and horror of work in all its forms; themes of celebration, futility, boredom and exhaustion are acutely depicted through films made by people caught within the processes of production.

The last major exhibitionary encounter within Enthusiasm was with the Archive Lounge. We were conscious that there were many films that could not be accommodated through our taxonomies. An Archive Lounge would enabled visitors to watch, via searchable DVD’s- all the films found, collected and digitalized but not screened as part of our cinema installations. Our intention was to make as many films as possible available, to enable visitors to curate their own programmes and recognize that our selection - Love Longing and Labour - was part of an interpretive process and not final or in any way authorial.

Bibliography

Bennett Tony (1995) The Birth of the Museum London and New York, Routledge.

Bourdieu Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Derrida Jacques (1996) Archive Fever Chicago, The University of Chicago Press

Cummings, Neil & Lewandowska, Marysia (2001) Capital London, Tate Publishing.

- (2001) The Value of Things London/Basel, August/Birkhauser

- (2004) Enthusiasts Vol 1 Warsaw, Centre for Contemporary Art

- (2005) Enthusiasm Vol 2 London, Berlin, Barcelona, Whitechapel Art Gallery,KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Tapies Foundation.

Goux, Jean Joseph (1990) Symbolic Economies; After Marx and Freud Cornell University Press

Mauss, Marcel (1954) The Gift (1923 ish) London, Routledge

Negri Antonnio and Hardt Michael (2000) Empire Harvard University Press

Preziosi Donald (2003) Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art Museums and the Phantasms of Modernity Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press

Russel Catherine (1999) Experimental Ethnography: The work of Film in the Age of Video Durham, Duke University Press.

Sekula Alan (1983) Reading an Archive in Blasted Allegories (ed) Brian Wallis Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press

Schrift Alan D. (1997) The Logic of the Gift London, Routledge.

Simmel, Georg (1999) The Philosophy of Money (1900) London Routledge

Staniszewski Mary Anne (1998) The Power of Display Cambridge Mass, MIT Press

Wu, Chin-tao (2002) Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980’s London, Verso

Yudice George (2003) The Expediency of Culture London Duke University Press

----
return to already published