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Malmö/Lund, 15th of April 1998 The Virtual City, Out of Site Out of Site was held February 20-22, in Malmö Art Academy. Organisers were Statens konstråd (the National Public Art Council) and Malmö Konsthögskola (Malmö Art Academy). Key note speakers were Iwona Blazwick, Stan Douglas, Dan Graham, Renée Green, Joachim Koester, Mark Kremer, Eva Löfdahl, Alan Read and Elin Wikström. Culture in the Virtual City took place in Lund, April 3-5, organised by Oscar Hemer as a sequel to the 1993 symposium on Culture in the global village. Speakers included Anne Balsamo, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Michael Heim, Mark Poster, Kevin Robins, and Gayatri Spivak. All of a sudden, all around Sweden, we have a lively discussion with lots of occasions offered to think about a certain type of common ground. That spells: articulation of public space in the city. Not only are there events going on in 1998 European cultural capital Stockholm´s streets and art centres (the Architectural Museum, Modern Museum, independent spaces like Färgfabriken for example), but also in southern Sweden. Malmö and Lund recently arranged gatherings for thinking about public space, public art, and culture taken broadly in contemporary cities. Like, where is art, if it is out of site and where is culture, if it is in the virtual city? Can one even think of art in a non-site? With the institutional art theory, we have to take artists´ claim to make art ad notam. That means that all art also depends on its siting for (part of) its meaning. Specifically, when talking about art in the city, Robert Smithson´s distinction between site and non-site is irrelevant. Art becomes part of a general configuration of common space, and as well as visual design, also gives meaning to public space. Excluding the art of public decoration from art in public space, the Out of site symposium therefore narrowed its scope considerably. The idea of public art in tune with gallery art obviously has full support. Its main aim should thus be to problematise society, culture or art itself. But what about the public art par excellence: the disgraced genre of monuments? Public art surely tends to go "official", as Stan Douglas noted. The Swedish solution, a professional National Public Art Council, is certainly to be preferred to private interests, but its task is difficult and compromising. So, who is going to choose public art and public spaces for it? In practise, it still seems an abominable thing in good art to consider views of inhabitants when planning public art projects. Besides, which audience is to be consulted? The difficulties with Miroslaw Balka´s memorial for the victims of the "Estonia" ship accident, located in Djurgården, Stockholm, as related by Annika Öhrner is a case in point. Public art is site and audience specific by definition. It demands a sender to be meaningful. This has some bearing on what is called "relational aesthetics" (a convenient term most artists wouldn´t subscribe to in its implications). In response to city-space´s multiple audiences, an aesthetic in relation to whom? Taken to its extreme, the most important thing may not be a work put in place, but the preceeding discussion, as Mark Kremer said. But where would then memory reside? I quietly ask myself. Compared to this, the conference on Culture in the Virtual City turned a user-friendly side to its visitors. It started off from where the symposion on Culture in the global village left us in 1993. Since then, the Internet has more or less exploded among computerised people around the world. As Columbia University literary critic Gayatri Spivak said, globalisation is not anything you choose to have: it is here. The question is how to use it. How then is city culture affected by a fast and global economy with an increasing amount of digitally transmitted information? The cue for the title Culture in the Virtual City was taken from French-Italian architect, urban planner and speed theoretician (!) Paul Virilio. His conception of virtual city is a dystopian space, where digitalisation does not mean a shrinking world chatting with other continents as with neighbours. Instead, a gap opens up between those in real-time contact and the others who are left behind in a slower time. So, can we eventually talk of a common culture? Yes, one has to answer. A Great Divide or Big News are as easily sensed as they are hard to actually demonstrate. Culture, this fuzzy word, does not (today) refer to anything unknown. Examples are taken from traditional areas like media, art economy, and democracy. As significantly, the conference contributors were thoroughly considered about the inhabitants and use of the virtual public space. Culture, just like democracy, in the age of communications technology demands the same old considerations of power and representation of interests as earlier, as among others Anne Balsamo, media researcher in Atlanta, and Professor of Cultural Geography Kevin Robins from Newcastle-upon-Tyne University, remarked. Still, something has happened with the onset of new techniques in world-wide everyday use, besides asking for whom and where (and if, at all) this change has occurred. A markedly different language is in circulation. What does it mean, for instance, to bend the vocabulary of psychic disorders to fit cultural-aesthetic or communication practices? Can the new be comprehended with reference back to the unconscious, this suggestive metaphor coined by Freud at the last turn of the century? It is tempting to read a desire to cure the fragmentisation of urban culture. Maybe even to look for domains uncontaminated by cultural difference, when knowledge of these differences are made available, and city-life more complex. Charlotte Bydler, freelance art critic, PhD candidate in Art History, Uppsala University |