KIRAC 2017 Funding Application
To the Mondriaan Fund. Sunday, 15 January 2017.
Application: Artist Project Investment, “KIRAC 2017”. Funding was granted.
Explanation
What is KIRAC (Keeping It Real Art Critics), and how did it come about?
I had the sense that certain conversations about art were impossible in public discourse but possible in private. My experience in the art world taught me that. Everyone there is connected, and you have to be careful about what you do and do not say about art so as not to damage your position. I found that restrictive and looked for a way gradually to turn it inside out. I wanted to develop a platform that would allow this. Naturally, the project had to take on a spontaneous, documentary character. An extension of that private sphere. I began the project for personal reasons; I simply wanted to get something off my chest. By now, however, it has proved to be quite a breath of fresh air, provoking both positive and negative responses.
KIRAC has also brought us support from unexpected quarters. One of the Netherlands’ largest art dealers, Paul van Esch, offered to finance an episode and, in response to Episode 4, The Psychology of Jon Rafman, described us on Facebook as: “again (I have to admit) one of the best critical voices in reviewing art I have seen in a long long time. I have enjoyed this film, I had to smile big at its merciless and yet positive attitude (towards art in general and what to expect from it). There is still life after Art Forum.”
Hanne Hagenaars, curator and editor-in-chief of the art magazine Mr. Motley, wrote in a Facebook response to our first episode, Indignation at De Appel: “What feeble commentary in this film. I thoroughly enjoyed Saskia van Imhoff’s exhibition. Intelligent, reflective work. It is also so irritating to diss another artist in public. Tasteless.”
Jeroen Bosch of the website trendbeheer.com wrote about the same episode: “I am a fan of Saskia Noor van Imhoff, but also of the critic Kate Sinha. Mercilessly and knowledgeably, this is less a venting of gut feelings than an expression of genuine astonishment at something that is actually so visible.”
Both the positive and negative responses are symptomatic of something I have felt for years: contemporary art discourse is going through a drought. Beautiful, honest, deeply felt negative emotions have been so neglected that some people are positively clamouring for them, while others have entirely lost the taste for them and can no longer even imagine wanting to express negative criticism.
Because art and arts funding are under pressure from the populist neoliberal camp—Halbe Zijlstra—the idea has emerged that artists should support one another as much as possible. My film at De Appel about Saskia van Imhoff’s work was regarded as a breach of this social code, because I was negative about the work of a Dutch art darling of my own generation. The idea that, for that reason, I should not be “allowed” to express my criticism, as Hanne Hagenaars suggests above, is a sore spot I would like to put my finger on. First, because I find it very interesting and want to know what causes it, and second, because I do experience the exclusion of negative feelings—out of politeness—as a threat to a healthy, deeply felt experience and practice of art.
Irritation, indignation, boredom, recalcitrance, hatred, resignation and nausea are all part of the experience of art and, when well founded, part of a passion for art, just as much as admiration, cheerfulness, enchantment, conviction, sympathy, appreciation, emotion and gratitude. Taste, as an ultimate form of cultivation, evokes deeply felt, primary responses of this kind in which, for a sensitive and practised eye, a great deal of knowledge and experience often resonate. In fact, the feelings cannot be separated from reflection and background knowledge, since these are felt. These feelings, including the negative ones, can therefore be highly inspiring: irritation, for example, can sometimes lead to very incisive thoughts. It is a kind of fuel for the mind, ignited by the way it provokes its imagined audience. And it is the kind of fuel KIRAC runs on.
But why not make an episode about work you do like?
At present I flow towards the places where emptiness prevails. The art field is a kind of ecosystem in which different forces continually disturb one another. As soon as one force gains the upper hand, the system loses its balance; a weakening occurs that allows another force to spring up. In that sense, you could compare KIRAC to the wolves recently reintroduced into Yellowstone Park in America. Once the wolves were there, they began hunting the elk again, making the elk population healthier and more mobile. The riverbanks were no longer overgrazed, and the willows, which had been disappearing, began to grow again. Songbirds and beavers returned, and fish can once again lay their eggs in the willows’ shade, so anglers in Yellowstone Park are catching fat fish again.
The wolves formed an important link in the chain of a healthy ecosystem, and I think KIRAC is doing something similar at present. Not because I serve that healthy ecosystem—I am a selfish animal, like the wolf—but because I have to create the conditions under which I can practise art. In my case, that means hunting what I consider the weak aspects of contemporary art discourse. By criticising art I do not think is good, I create room to discuss art on my own terms, whether the art in question is good or bad. That I also tap into a need others feel is really just an interesting consequence. That I also provoke others’ aversion is an equally interesting consequence.
Building by tearing down
A child hits and drums on things to get to know them. The sounds that come from them, the moment something breaks and the resulting anger of an irate parent are all information through which the child learns the substance and meaning of objects. I drum on artworks, artists, filmmakers and producers to hear what they are, and I know that good art cannot possibly be broken: there is nothing I can say about Picasso, Bushman rock paintings, Mozart, Velázquez, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky and many, many others that would diminish them in the slightest, let alone break them.
In good art, the “flaws”—the long-windedness of The Brothers Karamazov, for example, or the sentimentality of Picasso’s Blue Period—are an intrinsic part of the practice. They are a condition of what is good and exceptional, and therefore can never detract from the work. In “traumatised” art, the flaws define both artist and art, making the work very truthful and moving, albeit in a limited sense: Mike Kelley, Tracey Emin. But with bad art, one can hardly speak of flaws at all. Because bad art often conforms entirely to an existing ideology, growing on it like a kind of mould, I choose to throw these moulds into the fire, to see what fumes they give off and what shadows their flames cast on the wall.
In the mists of the harsh, negative criticism I direct at bad artists and their work, strange portraits of artists emerge. Episode 4 is the most successful example: The Psychology of Jon Rafman is a portrait of Jon Rafman as I see him. By immersing myself in his work, I appropriate his psychology, motives and character. Because I genuinely believe in the interpretation I give them, my conviction becomes part of the portrait. Precisely by taking my own intuitions, hyperbolic comparisons and metaphors seriously, I practise a form of theatrical realism, like Van Gogh using caricatural forms in The Potato Eaters to paint a realistic portrait of an impoverished peasant family.
What you see in the videos is therefore real, but it is also a form of practised, blunt sincerity. I deliberately choose not to justify or explain this in the videos, or to qualify it through satire—for example by wearing funny costumes—because I think this detracts from both its seriousness and its humour. I see it as a form of humour when, at the beginning of Episode 2, Not This Way, Kate declares war in deadly earnest on a superficial, ambitious filmmaker. It is not acted; Kate is serious there too. But it is also a captured moment that, in the film and as an introduction, suddenly takes on bizarre proportions precisely because Kate takes herself so seriously.
I also find it uninteresting, and perhaps even objectionable, to take viewers by the hand, reassure them and win them over that way. By allowing viewers to experience the discomfort of the situation themselves, they can also experience how subjective I am and thereby take their OWN position towards what I say and show. Many people therefore experience discomfort and even aversion at the way I confront producer Steven Rubinstein in Episode 2 about the racist film he is making, because I am cruel and emotional, and because Steven struggles to articulate himself.
This very clearly reveals people’s Manichaean tendency to want to regard me, because my criticism is justified, as a good hero who proves his point against a worthy opponent in an objective, calm and sympathetic manner. But what if I conduct my criticism not with pure intentions, but from cruel and vengeful motives, precisely because my opponent has a public role and a weak character? Is this not part of the world?
The title Not This Way refers less to the producer’s film than to the demands people make of the conditions under which criticism is practised: objectivity, politeness and unambiguity. In other words, demands that, in practice, render every form of criticism harmless and complacent in advance. In this episode I tried to record as realistically as possible how everyone has their own reasons for arriving at criticism, and what happens when you try to express that criticism within an Amsterdam canal-belt milieu where everyone “wishes one another well”. Unexpectedly filming a telephone conversation without asking is a foot in the door of a world that normally shields itself carefully with good intentions and evasive behaviour, and thus always stays out of the firing line.
Finally, I come to my last discovery: the discovery of the personal. Why do I make it so personal? Why must the producer and filmmaker be criticised publicly? Why are Saskia Noor van Imhoff and Jon Rafman dragged into it? Surely the system is at fault—subsidies are under pressure, young people are raised with high ambitions these days—not those poor individuals?
The answer is very simple: otherwise I cannot tell my story. The system as such does not exist; it is always a simplified derivative of the particular—in other words, of the people themselves. The moment you make a film about “the system”, you enter a simplified reality. HyperNormalisation shows where that leads: using BBC archive material, filmmaker Adam Curtis discusses philosophical doomsday scenarios with which we are all already familiar, creating nothing more than a shameless sermon to the converted. The world is reflected not in sweeping, generalising models but in particular human realities. To return to the metaphor of drumming on artists: I drum on artists, producers and filmmakers so that, for a moment, they solidify in their fluidity and are briefly held accountable for themselves, briefly become portraits of themselves.
Work plan
KIRAC as a booster
KIRAC’s working method has two distinct modes. On the one hand, there is a sustained, concentrated focus on understanding the socioeconomic context in which artists operate today, and how this is expressed in the art they make. On the other, there are short, energetic bursts in which, from this focus, KIRAC responds to relevant artistic situations such as exhibitions, art objects, film projects and public discussions of art; the episodes emerge from these bursts. Taken together, the episodes therefore constitute an ongoing investigation in which contemporary art is placed within a broad social context: KIRAC uses given situations to develop its cultural analysis. With KIRAC 2017, I want to give this method free rein and take full advantage of the opportunities offered by art discourse in 2017. In effect, KIRAC is a kind of “booster” for the interpretation and significance of cultural events in 2017.
The central theme
The central focus of KIRAC Project 2017 is based on the insights emerging from KIRAC 2016 that I described in the explanation above. These insights can be summed up as the discovery that art objects, as given things, can be dissected; from that dissection emerges a clear picture of dominant views in our present society and of how those dominant views coincide with political and economic reality. In the episode on Jon Rafman, for example, I show which views are expressed in his work and why those particular views resonate with an international class of wealthy art buyers. Rafman’s neo-Christian morality connects specifically with the way wealthy people display their prosperity within a capitalist democracy. In KIRAC Project 2017, I want to explore this particular theme further.
Method
KIRAC really is about responding spontaneously and developing as we go. Towards the end of 2016, we suddenly filmed Jordan Wolfson’s exhibition at the Stedelijk, for an episode I had neither planned nor expected at all. Suddenly I saw something in that exhibition relating to the idea of spectacle art, which I had been thinking about for some time, and looking at his work suddenly made it possible to discuss it.
But because I understand that the committee wants as concrete a picture of KIRAC 2017 as possible, I have set out five planned episodes below. We intend to make between ten and fourteen episodes in 2017, and fixing them in advance would not be a good idea. The five episodes described below will probably change form as well. KIRAC is thus based on a mentality, an attitude, a philosophy and a spontaneous development within the concrete world. In our letter of objection, we explained why this does not mean KIRAC suffers from a lack of planning: rather, our open way of working is precisely the condition of KIRAC’s relevance.
List of episodes
The five planned episodes are not public.