Through the logic of economic rationalisation, political administrations can dictate radical overhauls of the cultural landscape with unimaginable damaging effects for the local arts ecosystem. In the face of a populist economic discourse that increasingly pits investment in the arts and culture sector against the funding of other fundamental social services, how do we defend the vital value that a museum of contemporary art such as M HKA plays in its situated context?
What is so singularly depressing about the political farce surrounding the proposed dismantling of M HKA is that the invoked logic of economic rationalisation still appears to have so much pull in political discourse. Haven’t the countless disasters of populist economics’ experiments with ‘austerity’ taught us anything? (The global political polycrisis is nothing other than the smouldering ruin of one such experiment in enforcing one austerity too many.) Indeed, it is utterly dispiriting that we find ourselves once again called upon to defend the various spaces of art as economically legitimate in their own right – and the fact that so many have so quickly and so vocally rallied to M HKA’s defence (even those relatively critical of that institution’s various perceived shortcomings) makes it abundantly clear that the vast majority of interested parties simply no longer buy the tired old canard of so-called ‘rationalisation’ – the last of the tenets of neoliberalism to go the way of the dodo. It is precisely this disconnect which unmasks the ministerial measure as the deeply undemocratic coup that it really is. None of us could have imagined that, in the year 2025 (of all years!), one must still come to the defence of art; and although most of us are beyond exhausted by the realisation that we have to do so regardless, we’ll rise to the challenge anyway. That in itself is a uniquely powerful indictment of the retrograde error of ‘their’ ways – as is the sobering fact that, as far as I can tell, absolutely no one seems to really want this move to happen anyway. And those who don’t care… simply don’t care.
M KHA’s collection is both internationally oriented and firmly rooted in the local art scene, particularly in post-war avant-garde art in Antwerp and Flanders. While contemporary art is often mistakenly seen as globalist, it is arguably the interplay between the local and the global in collections such as M HKA’s that enables one to make sense of an increasingly multipolar world. How do we articulate the importance of maintaining this dialogue between the here and the elsewhere within a museum collection? And what specific instances from M HKA’s collection or other museums can help us to support this case?
Here I must respond in part from the deeply personal perspective of my own modest contribution to the genesis of M HKA’s collection, as it is inside the museum on the Scheldt that I got my start, way back in the early 2000s, in the curating racket. And it is in that precise capacity that I had a ringside seat’s view of the gradual expansion of the notion of a museum’s collection to include much more than ‘mere’ artworks: one of the great intellectual experiments of the last quarter century that M HKA as an art institution has contributed to so generatively, precisely because of its keen understanding of all major ‘global’ art developments as necessarily and irreducibly ‘local’ in nature. It’s really because of my curatorial work trying to make sense of what is so distinctively ‘Antwerp’ about art from Antwerp, and what is so distinctively Vancouverite or carioca about art from Vancouver and Rio de Janeiro respectively, that I was able to understand what is so uniquely ‘provincial’, say, about Andy Warhol’s art in late sixties New York (to name but one example). Sure, I’ve read some cynics masquerading as ‘critics’ lazily complaining about the fact that, as a visitor to M HKA, you could sometimes get a better sense of what’s preoccupying contemporary artists from Kazakhstan than you could of the art scene of its hometown – but that’s a parochial view that vaguely smacks of the rhetoric of ‘eigen kunst eerst’, and emphatically not an instance of ‘critical regionalism’. (In 2015, I had the pleasure and privilege of traveling to Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, on a curatorial fact-finding mission. I was amazed to find myself interviewed by Kazakh state television and being asked by its leading cultural journalist: ‘why does the museum of contemporary art in Antwerp have so much art from Central Asia in its collection?’ I honestly found this to be an incredibly humbling, heartening moment.) In fact, it is in many ways M HKA’s deep sense of local anchorage, of ‘belonging’ to the unique historical ecosystem of Antwerp’s visual and aesthetic sense of self (which ended up being the topic of an exhibition of M HKA’s collection in the sister city of Shanghai back in 2006), that is in danger of being erased by the minister of culture’s ukase.
Collections are established through relationships of mutual trust and responsibility. A museum has a duty of care towards its collections and donors, towards the artists – dead or alive – whose work it preserves, and towards the diverse publics and local communities it caters for. How do we defend the will of donors who entrusted a collection to a particular institution when that collection is at risk of being dismantled and relocated? What legal instruments and ethical protocols can we appeal to?
I’ve heard that the likes of Anish Kapoor, Annette Messager and Emily Kabakov (the latter two also on behalf of their deceased spouses Christian Boltanski and Ilya Kabakov, respectively) have started writing letters to the Flemish government threatening to block the future public display of their works in M HKA’s collection if the destruction of M HKA’s museum functions goes ahead as planned, and I’m sure those letters are bound to make an impression. (I’m sure the minister of culture has heard of Anish Kapoor – the maker of instantly recognizable instances of ‘art’). The thing is, if it’s the relocation of M HKA’s collection from Antwerp to Ghent (to dramatically expand that city’s existing S.M.A.K. museum) we seek to contest and stop, the single strongest gesture is for the latter institution’s to make. S.M.A.K. should simply refuse to take on an ensemble of artworks and related materials that will ‘dilute’ their existing collection (which is the product of its own unique history, one that could not be more different from that of its Antwerp counterpart – and which it is presently unable to accommodate anyway) as much as it will destroy M HKA’s. The fate of the flagship of Antwerp’s contemporary art scene rests in the hands of ‘the people’ of Ghent, and ‘they’ should be wise enough to realise that Ghent’s contemporary art scene would be best served in turn by the continued prospering of its sister cities’ arts ecosystems, whether it be Brussels, Bruges, Mechelen, Leuven, Ostend, Hasselt, or Antwerp. In the case of contemporary art, as in the case of almost everything else – remember the catastrophic lessons of so much ‘austerity’! – less is simply just… less.