In 2020 the artist acquired twenty wooden doorknobs originating from the former Sint Jacobs Gasthuis, now housing Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, at an antiques and collectibles auction. Turns consists of six abstract wall sculptures based on several models of these doorknobs, created by local wood turners. Four spherical shaped pieces were made on traditional wood-turning lathes; the two oval shaped pieces were manufactured using computer-controlled turning and milling machines. Turns is installed in the recently renovated stairwell of the "Vrouwenvleugel" (Women's Wing).

In their function as fittings, doorknobs may grant access to spaces or prevent entry. This sense of shelter and separation runs parallel to the Sint Jacobs Gasthuis's original social function in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, an almshouse, where men and women lived separated in two different wings. The set of twenty doorknobs forms a material witness of this gender division embedded in the building's architecture and experienced by the almshouse's residents. As products of craft, the doorknobs remind of Schiedam's historical woodworking industry, traces of which can still be found in the museum's collection.

The work's title Turns can be understood literally as referring to the rotating movement of doorknobs as well as the technique of artisinal wood turning, in which wood is shaped as it rotates at high speed. It can also allude to the shifts and turns in the museum's programming, which has changed significantly over time alongside the building in which it is housed, and which are both subject to the confluence of social and economic dependencies.

The twenty original doorknobs are donated to Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and are on display at the bottom of the stairwell. Reworked into a formal grid inside a display case, they form a nod to the museum’s collection of work by the Zero and Nul artist groups.

In postwar Europe, internationalisation of industrial trade relations was initiated through the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), a supranational organisation established in 1951 to regulate coal and steel production in Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany. This effectively started the process of formal integration leading to the later European Union. By the 1960s, rapid market globalisation caused the price of domestic coal to exceed that of imported coal arriving at European seaports. Closures of unprofitable European coal mines were soon enacted under ECSC policy. In accordance, the Dutch government decided to close all mines in the Netherlands in 1965.

The Dutch State Mines were established at the start of the twentieth century by assigning the entire coal field of the province of Limburg to the state for exploitation, as far as not yet given to private concession. When the last mine closed in 1973, the Dutch State Mines were corporatised into the publicly traded company Royal DSM NV. The Dutch state floated all DSM shares between 1989 and 1996, completing its privatisation.

Before the cessation of coal mining, by-products of the gasification of coal had already incited an industry for bulk chemicals, including ammonia and fertilisers. The public investments in research and development enabled DSM to expand its petrochemical activity, such as by establishing the first EPDM rubber membrane factory in Europe. Today the innovative plastics and engineering materials developed by DSM are monetised by private companies.

The Electricity Act 1998, or Elektriciteitswet 1998, introduced new state legislation for the production, transmission and supply of electricity in the Netherlands. It provided the legal base for the privatisation of public utility companies that built, maintained and operated the Dutch energy sector infrastructure. Along with the later Gas Act of 2000, this paved the way for the liberalisation of the energy market as a whole. These developments should be seen in the context of the internationalisation of the energy sector within the European Union. Two years before the Electricity Act 1998, in December 1996, the European Parliament and Council published their Directive 96/92/EC, concerning rules for a common electricity market. This directive acted in accordance with the Treaty establishing the European Community and its respective interests to adopt measures that ensure the smooth running of the internal European market. A market "without internal frontiers—in which the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital is ensured."

The European policy developments of Directive 96/92/EC were already anticipated by the Dutch Third White Paper on Energy, or Derde Energienota, published in January 1996. This document – propagating the principle “market if possible, government if necessary” – set targets for renewable energy by focusing on a market structure with freedom of production, trade and supply, and an energy network that is accessible to new market players. The EU Directive affirmed this Dutch commitment to liberalise and integrate energy markets.

In the same month that the Dutch Electricity Act was published, management advisors B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore published their paper titled ‘Welcome to the Experience Economy’ in the July-August 1998 issue of Harvard Business Review. In their paper, the authors start out with the question: How do economies change? They claim that the next step in what they call the “progression of economic value” is characterised by the desire of consumers for experiences. While economic offerings such as commodities, goods, and services are external to the buyer, experiences are inherently personal, existing only in the mind and body of an individual who has been engaged on an emotional, physical, intellectual, or even spiritual level. According to the authors, no two people can have the same experience, because “each experience derives from the interaction between the staged event (like a theatrical play) and the individual’s state of mind.” Commodities are fungible, goods tangible, services intangible, and experiences: memorable.

Along with the transfer of economic control from the public sector to the private sector, and the articulation of an economy based on marketable experiences, the year 1998 saw a surge in the circulation and consumption of electronic dance music—thanks in part due to mass popularisation of recreative drug use, which by the end of the '90s had crossed over from raves to mainstream clubs. Notably, 1998 was marked by an improvement in the quality of XTC available on European markets by example of the “Mitsubishi” pill. At the same time, electronic dance music genres such as progressive house and trance greatly increased in popularity towards the end of the millennium, transforming dance and clubbing culture into a profitable industry, with high-capacity nightclubs emerging all over Europe—a continent of optimism without internal frontiers.

Where warehouses and industrial sites used to set the stage for the circulation of progressive dance and clubbing culture, in the '90s the art world picked up and started repurposing these derelict spaces – raw material for spectacular and “authentic” sites of display – for both occasional and permanent staging of contemporary art. In all such places, the consumption of art as a democratised bourgeois experience exists as an abstract divide between collective and private experience. An experience to remember.

With commencement of the Personeelswet PTT Nederland NV Act (file number 20368), the Wet op de telecommunicatievoorzieningen Act (20369), the Machtigingswet PTT Nederland NV Act (20370) and the Postwet Act (20371), the Dutch national post transformed into a publicly traded company in 1989. The postal services continued as Koninklijke PTT Nederland NV (KPN), with PTT Post and PTT Telecom as its main subsidiaries. Even though the Dutch state initially remained sole shareholder, its business operations were deliberately dissociated from direct government responsibility. The later Wet beursgang KPN Act (23222) amended legislation to allow for KPN’s initial public offering on the Amsterdam stock exchange. In 1994, the Dutch state floated 30% of the KPN shares, followed by a further 25% in 1995, losing its position as majority shareholder. In 1998, PTT Post split off from KPN, after which the postal company continued – together with the Australian Thomas Nationwide Transport (TNT) and the international courier service GD Express Worldwide, both acquired by KPN two years earlier – as TNT Post Group NV. The company’s official name was changed to TPG in 2001 and again in 2005 to TNT NV. In 2006 the Dutch state sold its last shares of both telecom company KPN and postal company TNT NV. In 2011 TNT NV was split into postal company PostNL NV and courier company TNT Express NV, which was acquired in 2016 by the American company FedEx.

Insurance companies concern the protection of property and assessing the risk of loss. When insured art objects are damaged and deemed a total loss by the insurer, they are prescriptively declared "No Longer Art" to remove them from art market circulation due to their indicated loss of value in the marketplace.¹ After payment of claims, ownership of insured objects is transferred to the insurer. Depending on the agreement reached, they may either be withdrawn from market circulation completely or still be salvaged and sold or repurposed otherwise.²

The irreparably damaged painting Black Painting, 1960-1966 by American minimalist painter Ad Reinhardt was donated by multinational AXA Art Insurance Corporation to the Guggenheim Museum in 2001 as part of a conservation study in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art.³ AXA also awards grants to conservation research projects that “promise long-term contributions to the preservation of cultural assets for future generations,” which funded the study and treatment of the donated Reinhardt painting.⁴ The “New,” Reinhardt stated, is “formed on the dead ground.”⁵

Insurance companies concern the protection of property and assessing the risk of loss. When insured art objects are damaged and deemed a total loss by the insurer, they are prescriptively declared "No Longer Art" to remove them from art market circulation due to their indicated loss of value in the marketplace.¹ After payment of claims, ownership of insured objects is transferred to the insurer. Depending on the agreement reached, they may either be withdrawn from market circulation completely or still be salvaged and sold or repurposed otherwise.²

The irreparably damaged painting Black Painting, 1960-1966 by American minimalist painter Ad Reinhardt was donated by multinational AXA Art Insurance Corporation to the Guggenheim Museum in 2001 as part of a conservation study in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art.³ AXA also awards grants to conservation research projects that “promise long-term contributions to the preservation of cultural assets for future generations,” which funded the study and treatment of the donated Reinhardt painting.⁴ The “New,” Reinhardt stated, is “formed on the dead ground.”⁵

Industry as Culture as Industry

In 1990, six paintings were installed in a then recently-­dismantled textile factory in Tilburg to test the ­capacity of the building as an exhibition space.^* Artworks by Rob Birza, Marlene Dumas, Guido Lippens and Marc Mulders – three works came from the collection of the nearby Van Abbemuseum, and another three were loans from the artists – were mounted on makeshift walls mounted for the occasion inside the former spinning mill. This one-day trial display marked the beginning of what came to be the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art.¹ In a related act of repurposing industrial space, the TextielMuseum and TextielLab (an innovative workshop established in the heart of the museum) opened in a defunct woolen blanket factory that had been converted in 1985. These two occurrences condense ­Tilburg’s history of economic transition, which took it from home-based cottage industry to factory-­based manufacturing, and towards a creative industry.

To explore these economic shifts, Timo Demollin conceived Surplus Composition, an ensemble of six textile assemblages made using left-over cloth from the TextielLab—each part exactly the same size as the artworks featured in De Pont’s first display. While Demollin’s artistic practice has in the past favored strategies of site-specificity within art’s institutional environments, the material and discursive frames of Surplus Composition expand this working method to the broader economic context of industrial history and the ways in which it conditions artistic ­production today. The work also investigates the extent to which an artwork that uses institutional contexts as a resource is dependent on the institution’s reciprocal acknowledgment of such a position. This text in turn places that investigation within a larger historical and theoretical framework by situating cultural production within the transition from a manufacturing-oriented economy to one based on service work, addressing the role of art and creativity in contemporary wealth accumulation, and challenging the institutional recuperation of artistic gestures of reflexivity.

Surplus Composition reproduces the shapes and dimensions of the six artworks that initiated the De Pont Museum while following the uniform weaving sizes that result from mechanical standardization in textile manufacturing. Because the textiles that Demollin uses for his compositions all have the same standard 165 cm width, viewers can see some of the stretcher bars under the material in the wider frames. These textiles are sourced from the TextielLab, which separates the productions of their computer-controlled Jacquard machines by adding bands of excess fabric after each finished operation, using residual batches­ of grey, white, and ecru cotton yarns. Routinely, this ­dispensable surplus is manually cut off from the actual product by the machine operators, in varying lengths, and is either thrown away or used as cleaning rags. Demollin salvaged these materials from the TextielLab and decided to sew their ends together, forming one new bolt of fabric to serve as the basis for the work. To determine his assemblage’s composition, the artist let a randomized sorting algorithm shuffle the order into an aleatory pattern, which was then manually cut according to the size of each of the subsequent stretchers. Just as the organization of labor processes and ­perfor­mance today is ­increasingly regulated by technical algorithmic control, so too the composition of the artwork is outsourced and automated. While on a visual level the result handily invokes painting, the contextual specificity of Surplus Composition projects the work into other domains.

From proto-industrialization to post-Fordist creativity

Since the late Middle Ages, textiles in Tilburg and the surrounding region were typically produced by weavers who worked from their homes, known in Dutch as wevershuizen, “weaver’s homes.” This cottage industry functioned with subcontracting ­arrangements, the so-called “putting-out” system. Whereas ­independent­ artisans worked directly for their clients, these manu­facturers worked for drapers, that is to say, for the traveling traders that Karl Marx described as capitalists functioning within a pre-industrial system.² Locally, the Industrial Revolution accelerated in 1827, when Tilburg saw the first steam engines arrive to put its spinning machines in motion, and by 1870 the appearance of the mechanical loom pushed textile ­production decisively away from the domestic and into the factory.³ Since the social structure of the wevershuizen was dependent on the Catholic church, and was hence less organized than guilds, their fragmentation made it ­impossible for weavers to bargain collectively over their working conditions.

Following the offshoring of large-scale industrial manufacturing to ­peripheral developing countries, the inevitable decline of Western Europe’s textile ­industry towards the second half of the twentieth century obliged Tilburg – along with cities with a similar history, such as Manchester, Leeds and Ghent – to diversify its affected economy.⁴ Cities that had been dependent on heavy industries tried, among other things, to ­revitalize abandoned factory complexes and implement a proactive cultural policy that encouraged cultural ­production, circulation and consumption.⁵ After the demise of Tilburg’s textile industry following the 1960s, the TextielMuseum succeeded in regenerating textile production by specializing in technological and digital developments, and commissioning designs from renowned artists and designers.⁶ Part of the value created today is propelled by having the entire production process on show in a hybrid space that combines modern office aesthetics with remnants of the industrial era. In this space, visitors can wander around the artists as they work with high tech machines that replaced their predecessors. In a strange twist of fate, these waning industrial sites have become incubators for valorization through creativity; as the editors of Comeback Cities observe, industrial heritage became available during post-Fordism as raw material for an emerging ­cultural economy that was on the lookout for new urban sources of inspiration and creativity.⁷ Artists, cultural producers par excellence, suddenly found themselves at the center of a new economic model, one that valued not only art as such, but also creativity as a valuable resource in itself.⁸

We now recurrently experience the conversion of derelict industrial sites into mainstream assets for the cultural economy, with cultural hubs regularly endowing industrial spaces with new significance. Inversely, the site of a former factory can endow cultural venues with the right coolness factor⁹­—one that makes them suited to creative work, cultural tourism and heritage consumption. Indeed, Tilburg’s history as a city of textile industry has become part of its spatial, ­economic, cultural and social repertoire.¹⁰ It is their link to this industrial history that gives value to the distinctive ­­museum space of the De Pont Museum and the design production the TextielMuseum. This parasitic loop – old manufacturing industries disappear, service industries come in requiring a cultural base and thus double down on industrial heritage – can be extrapo­lated to art spaces worldwide, with Dia Beacon and Tate Modern as prime examples. Nicholas Serota, Tate director from 1988 to 2017, has stated that the De Pont Museum served as a model for the Tate Modern to open in London’s decommissioned Bankside Power Station.¹¹ In all such places, the ­current of cultural ­energy that flows through converted sites is actively put to use. Inside the ­TextielMuseum, the steam engine that once propelled the entire factory is still running, though now it is electrically powered and runs aimlessly: it does not affect any particular operation, and its only function is to set in motion the reminiscence of the factory’s past.

The creative versus the “real” economy

In an effort to gauge the imbrication of ­contemporary­ art with processes of valorization and capital accumulation, it is tempting to look at art in terms of its financialization and to analyze how investors and corporations use art as an asset with which to diversify their portfolios and increase their social status.¹² Although tempting, that path is too limiting for the case at hand, as it easily misses the system at work below the star artists, blue-chip galleries, and auction house extra­vaganzas: the surplus value generated by all the cultural producers who form the very infrastructure of cultural production, but who benefit little from its profits. Sociologists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud ­Esquerre have offered an ambitious analysis of this creation of value in their book Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities (2017), in which they argue that industries of fashion, luxury products and tourism are the engines of a new mode of value formation, which is increasingly modeled on an economy based on the valorization of cultural heritage, and in which cultural producers are the main actors.¹³ They suggest that the establishment of excessive value and its resulting wealth accumulation occurs less through the manufacture and trade of industrial products proper. Rather, value is increasingly extracted from intangible resources: ideas, concepts and narratives that give meaning and value to things, places, and persons, and on which their appraisal depends. This makes cultural producers essential. Principally, such an economic model is keen to commodify prestige (e.g., the reputation attributed to a certain geographical territory and its cultural heritage, to which luxury brand names and city marketing campaigns can link their status). This does not mean that material goods have lost their significance. Rather, this means that enriched objects – goods appreciated for their particular immaterial qualities, including art – have started to constitute a major source of financial profit for the already super-rich.¹⁴

Boltanski and Esquerre’s theory of an economy of enrichment can be used as a tool to reexamine the economic forces at work in cultural production; it allows us to move beyond ­Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic and cultural capital (in its embodied, objectified, and institutionalized forms), and Baudrillard’s notion of sign value, by showing how symbolic values are subsumed into a concrete exchange of (monetary) goods. According to Bourdieusian field theory, the field of cultural production is characterized as a structured social space organized by an uneven distribution of different forms of capital.¹⁵ Fields denote areas for the production, circulation, and appreciation of goods, services, knowledge or status, and the competitive positions held by actors in their struggle to accumulate and monopolize capital. Cultural producers and economic elites alike each mobilize their respective forms of capital to stake claims within their particular social domain, and the overlap of their fields brings them into permanent conflict—for example, over the power to determine what cultural products hold value.

However, to insist exclusively on the symbolic aspect of cultural production would be to perpetuate an opposition between a material and a symbolic realm, when in fact anything that enters the creative ­economy can always be considered under these two aspects simultaneously.¹⁶ Boltanski and Esquerre insist on this confluence in an attempt to assess how the ­production of “imma­terial” cultural goods (such as works of contemporary art) are essential resources in the enrichment of the happy few. This raises anew the issues of power and property that were already at play within the social relations inside the capitalist factory. However, in contrast to the struggle over the means of production, cultural producers – in possession of little economic capital, but sufficiently well “equipped” with cultural capital to produce “intangible” products – generally lack ownership and control over the means of valorization required to participate in the profits generated in and by the creative economy. Within such a struggle, value determination is monopolized by institutions and economic elites alike, and these, in turn, come to define the “rules of the game”¹⁷ governing cultural production.

Locating critique as added value

An artwork can address its complicity in a changing economic system by drawing on a tradition of self-­reflexivity. Visually, Surplus Composition alludes to a formalist paradigm that once held sway: it recognizes the aggrandized prestige of pictorial abstraction, while the oil-stained rags indicate their industrial origin and the work’s equivocal title hints at systems of economic value. But how does a text partake in this imbrication? The status of this text can likewise be considered within a system of valorization: in the crudest sense, Surplus Composition is made of left-over cloth on stretchers, and it is up to the artist’s verbal ­capacities and the critic’s reflective and mediating abilities to provide a discourse that endows it with symbolic value. In an exhibition context, such an accompanying text serves mostly as a placeholder, since its mere presence is sufficient to help the work to circulate. In the case of this text, it might be argued that it functions also as a necessary element to activate the signification of the work in question, given that it investigates the ways in which Surplus Composition acts upon the economic systems within which it functions. The text, consequently, becomes constitutive of the reception of the work and reflectively establishes the conditions of the work’s intelligibility. On this front, it should be noted that Surplus Composition manages not only to place itself vis-à-vis the economic conditions of ­industrial-cum-art spaces, but also demonstrates the duality of art’s perceptual and discursive spaces. By commissioning this text, its framing is framed.

In an art system defined by economic control as a principal component of power and agency, and in which art and cultural life are used as assets with which to accumulate different forms of capital, this ambiguity between negation and engagement towards a status quo might be considered an essential condition of critique.¹⁸ By proposing context as a multi­dimensional condition that necessitates implicating the artist’s own involvement within the art system, Demollin’s double position creates the conditions for undertaking a self-critical analysis aimed at surpassing symbolic gestures of disclosure. As Dorothea von Hantelmann says, such work is never detached but always engaged: “Unlike with Minimal Art, it is not only a question of the phenomenological conditions of the exhibition space but also of art’s discursive framing. And it is not just about rendering visible, or exhibiting these discursive framings and conventions as in Institutional Critique, but about operating with them, i.e. recognizing the potential for construction and change that lies in their usage.”¹⁹

It is helpful to examine this notion of usage further if we are to consider the utility of framings and conventions as artistic materials. In the context of the discussed transition from an industrial, manufacturing-oriented economy to a post-industrial economy oriented around service work, situating usage merely within the Marxist dichotomy between exchange value and use value would be to reduce cultural production entirely to symbolic aspects. In the case of institutionalized art, usage touches not only upon the recent history of “social practice”,²⁰ but also on the historical Constructivist-Productivist moment in which artists actually worked in industry. If we think that the historical specificity of Surplus Composition is that it gestures towards those institutional ­paradigms which blurred the distinction between art and life, then the only thing left to do is to challenge the artwork’s very own life cycle and institutionalization. The artwork’s thematization of economic transition and value determination necessitates a further implication of the art institutions that inform the work’s content.

Problems of performing criticality

Timo Demollin highlighted the historical tie between the De Pont Museum and the Van Abbemuseum ²¹ as the work’s central context when he announced the first presentation of Surplus Composition.²² For his exhibition’s promotional image, the artist ­appropriated the 1992 invitation card (a photograph of empty white walls in the De Pont Museum’s newly ­renovated building) originally announcing the museum’s ­opening exhibition. More accurately, Demollin used the ­original invitation sent to the Van Abbemuseum, which he found in the museum’s library archives in ­Eindhoven. One could say that when artists appropriate the conditions, media, and strategies that emerge from an ­institutional context and incorporate them as resource materials in their artwork, they not only thematize the workings of the institution, but also invert the incorporation of artworks in institutional art collections. This conceptual inversion might offer artists, whether operating inside or outside the art institution, a tool for setting values of a different kind, values that resist art’s usage and instrumentalization as an asset for capital accumulation. Upholding art ­criticism as an interdependent practice forms an equally necessary act within this resistance and within the effort to reclaim and redefine the means of valorization. The crucial question remains whether the inevitable institutional recuperation of such reflexive critique asks for a double reflexivity, one that thematizes this very circular relationship as resource material in and of itself.

Moving its visibility inside the museum frame, then, might give Surplus Composition its most ­effective site for critical reflection. Should the De Pont Museum and the Van Abbemuseum decide to add Surplus Composition to their collections – for ­example, by means of a joint acquisition – the work could play a significant role in having the museums reclaim ­stewardship of their own patrimony, and thus in acknowledging their mutual entanglement and involvement in shifting economies. In terms of labor organization, pre-industrial artisanry in domestic workshops may show resemblances to today’s artistic production, or any other post-industrial gig work by freelancers, working from home or in cafés. The displacement of economic value production from an atomized labor structure to the centralized factory, then, is an eerie historical model for the current transition of symbolic value production from creative work to the art institution. In other words, if museums are the factories of the enrichment economy, how then to control the means of valorization? Should museums recognize narratives of their involvement in recent economic shifts by absorbing an artistic gesture into their structures, thus furthering their ambitions for an emancipatory or critical museum practice? Does doing so impair art’s potential for “construction and change” (as  Von Hantelmann puts it) by the appropriation of its criticality? Or is it rather the case that institutional appraisal as such successfully administers the work’s aim of advancing a critical tradition of artistic self-­reflexivity? And, lastly, which actors ultimately have the power to determine the role an artwork will play?

Laurens Otto
Timo Demollin (Ed.)

This Time It’s Personal: Politics as an Expansion of the Self
Essay (excerpt) by Laurens Otto, in: The Name of The Author

Back in 1971, a museum could still forbid using art as “active engagement toward social and political ends.” ¹ In that year Hans Haacke was prevented by the director of the Guggenheim from revealing how a single man, Harry Shapolsky, had jacked up the rents of impoverished New York neighbourhoods. ² How different that is from today, when exhibiting social injustice has become the main current in contemporary art. The basis of this “political” approach can still be seen as problematic today, but now for another reason. One could object to Haacke’s form of institutional critique that it leaves the murky position of the artist out of the picture—the work fails to negotiate how Haacke’s participation at the Guggenheim itself contributes to gentrification.

While visiting the graduation exhibitions at the Sandberg Instituut, I noticed that some artists have not used art as such a disengaged social tool. Those who intrigued me the most have managed to do something else. They somehow effectuated a double movement: the work takes up a situation that always harks back to the involvement of the artist … in that very same situation. In the works of Timo Demollin, Loidys Carnero, Anastasia Kubrak, Juan Pablo Mejía, and Rein Verhoef, the artist’s own entanglement in a certain state of affairs is also highlighted. To such a degree that the personal is already part of the analysed condition, a part of the world. Thus the personal becomes political, which in turn becomes personal …

How this approach differs from that of the likes of Hans Haacke, is most striking in the work of Timo Demollin, precisely because it has partly inherited the strategies of institutional critique. In Mutual Support, on show at Looiersgracht 60 as part of the group exhibition by the graduates of Fine Arts, he presents some of the in-house equipment of that same space. This assemblage ranges from standing tables to soup cups, and from plastic trays to exhibition walls: all objects that can be rented for an exhibition or any other event. Demollin examines the transition of the venue from a cardboard and postcard factory to an exhibition space that now partakes fully in the culture industry. Here, the difference from Haacke is that the title, Mutual Support, should be read with as little cynicism as possible. The artist examines the underlying economic structures of art, while fully acknowledging the mutual interest both the artist and the venue have in the trade of symbolic and financial capital. The position of Demollin is in no way detached from the situation he analyses.

[…] One could object that all artists do exactly what I have tried to describe above: show their personal involvement in an external reality. However, most art that succeeds in this effort is confined to a personal space: either the artist’s body or the studio ^{6 7}, is used to reflect upon the outside world. Here, by contrast, some of the graduates of the Sandberg Instituut are not trying to conjure political forces merely within a personal experience, but turn the situation inside out by spreading the personal out into the outside world. It is not an easy task to make art whilst knowing that everything can be subsumed under capitalism. One possible step forward, though, seems to be first and foremost to address one’s own complicity in the systems one is dissecting.

Interview with Olav Velthuis, May-June 2018

TD: You have frequently published on the global economic context of art and its commercial markets, shedding light on the various relationships between art and finance and the discrepancies between public and private funding. Within the context of the Netherlands and Europe in particular, we see art institutions transitioning from a public funding model to one increasingly supported by private money. In what ways does this affect the traditionally ’public’ status of art institutions?

OV: I would like to start out saying that I have no problems a priori with commercial art markets or private initiatives in contemporary art worlds. In fact, I think many critics of commerce & privatization have a rather simple, caricatural and little nuanced vision. ­Private initiatives, collectors, patrons, museums etc. come in all forms. There is a lot of variation between them, and in some cases, a well-run, professional private museum may have more in common with a public museum than with another private museum that is not so professional, financially driven etc. Nor do I think that public funding of art institutions is necessarily better than private funding. Public funding comes with problems of its own: bureaucracy, audit culture, problematic sources of public funding (think of the taxes which the Netherlands steals away from other countries, including developing countries, by being a tax haven for foreign multinationals) or, in countries like China, censorship.
  Nevertheless, I think that the art world has been too eager and too uncritical in pursuing an American-style support system, which relies more on private donations, for reasons I will come back to below.

TD: A concurrent analysis in your writing is that of the ­private museum being used by wealthy elites as a financial instrument for realising beneficial income tax deductions, as seen in the Unites States and increasingly across the globe. You have claimed that this is problematic, because these indirect subsidies do not fall under the democratic control that applies to direct subsidies. Can artistic ­activities be seen as a perfunctory financial asset for corporations and wealthy individuals?

OV: Well, I actually don’t see it as a financial instrument. In other words, I don’t think the main goal of many founders of private museums is just the tax deduction they get. But yes, I do think these tax deductions are problematic. It means that states are raising less taxes. Moreover, it means that the type of art that is favored by the super-rich gets stimulated through these indirect subsidies. This means that economic inequality, which has been on the rise big-time in many countries, gets translated into cultural inequality. In other words, the rich get more and more influence on what art gets exhibited and preserved. That has of course been the case in the past as well (think of the Medici, the courts, the church), but in my mind, the disentanglement of economic wealth and cultural influence which took place in social democratic regimes in the 20th century, is still worth striving for.
  Another problem I have with these private museums is that in many cases the source of the money can be quite dubious, e.g. when it considers Russian oligarchs. They use the art world to whitewash their reputations. There is too little debate about those sources, so about where all the new money that has been flowing into art worlds over the last decade or so, has been coming from.

TD: Last February the progressive left-wing Dutch ­magazine De Groene Amsterdammer published an in-depth article titled De ondernemende mecenas: hoe de superrijken hun liefdadigheid organiseren (The enterprising patron: how the super-rich organise their charity). It reflected on the way in which the cultural ANBI status, as used in the Netherlands, encourages philanthrocapitalist practices. In the case discussed, entertainment industry entrepreneurs do not support other institutions, but more generally their very own cultural non-profit subsidiary organisations. How common are these practices of looped financial constructions within the arts? (thinking of conglomerates of galleries, power dealers, critics and private foundations...)

OV: To be honest, that’s hard to say. We simply know too little about that at this point. By the way, I have nothing against powerful art galleries, critics or collectors per se. They can organize wonderful shows, and sometimes, especially in countries where the government ignores the art world, support forms of non-commercial art that nobody else does. Think of Inhotim in Brazil, a private museum which has been doing a great job in ­education, or the Garage Museum in Moscow, founded by the Russian oligarch Abramovich and his ex-wife Zhukova. My problem is, also in these two cases, that we know little about where the money is coming from. [Inhotim’s founder Bernardo Paz], for instance, was recently sentenced to more than nine years in jail for money laundering (he will appeal the sentence).

TD: Under neoliberal policies, museums are also seeing a gradual transformation of their public services and architectural layout, accommodating commercialization and cashing in on their cultural capital. Last year, the Stedelijk Museum refurbished their entrance lobby to realise a more spacious, open plan in order to host receptions. At the same time, new venues rather start out with a more hybrid model from their conception, using flexible spaces that are by design equally suitable for both rental activities and art ­exhibitions. Can you elaborate on the ways in which art market entrepreneurs and collectors invest equally in both artworks as well as their (institutional) infrastructure?

OV: From the point of view of the museum, it makes sense that they do that. They are forced to raise more private money. For me, one of the main questions is how these types of refurbishments impacts the many other roles which museums are supposed to play, e.g. as educators, conservators and exhibitors of contemporary culture. I find it hard to generalize about that.

TD: Art venues state that by hiring their spaces for events, one supports their cultural and artistic endeavours. Is this financial relationship internally correlative? Are ­cultural and artistic activities not also supporting the ­commercial activities of these venues through generating artistic aura, cultural capital and symbolic value?

OV: Of course, if a company decided to organize an event in the Stedelijk, it does that at least to some extent because it wants to associate themselves with art and hope that its aura rubs off on it. But as a sociologist, I think that holds for many, if not all people who are involved in art. Art is about distinction, about accumulating cultural and symbolic capital, as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has shown so convincingly. I would say it is never the only motivation for people to ‘do something with art,’ but it almost always is one of the reasons, even if people are not willing to admit it, or may not even fully realize that.

TD: According to Marxist theory, the value of one thing is expressed in another, i.e. value is an abstraction being disconnected from its labour. If value is seen as such a social relation, what could the production of symbolic value possibly mean for the market distribution of artistic labour and its relation to art venues and their activities?

OV: I have a different take on this. You refer to Marx’ notion of commodity fetishism, by which he meant that in capitalist societies we think a commodity has value in and of itself, and we forget that a commodity actually involves social relationships, so a relationship between the persons who made the commodity (and probably got exploited in doing so) and the person who buys it. I would say: art markets are one of the few markets where we are permanently aware, maybe even ­obsessed, with the relationship involved, so in that sense commodity fetishism is not so much at stake. Think of all the art collectors who want to meet the artists who created the works they bought, want to hang out with them, get a glimpse into their creative minds, etc.
  I prefer to see value creation in art markets from a Bourdieusian perspective. The central idea is then that the symbolic value of the work first needs to be created (so the work needs to be recognized by critics, museums, peers etc.), and that only once this symbolic value is established, this value can be converted into economic value. In other words, without forms of institutional recognition, without reputation, it is very hard for a gallerist or an independent artist to market her work.

Olav Velthuis is Professor at the Department of Sociology of the University of Amsterdam, specializing in economic sociology, sociology of the arts and cultural sociology. Velthuis's research interests include the globalization of art markets, the interrelations between market and gift exchange and the valuation and pricing of contemporary art. Velthuis is the author of several books, including Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton University Press, 2005). Together with curator and writer Maria Lind he edited the book Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios (Sternberg Press, 2012). His academic work has appeared in leading journals in social science, and his journalistic writings have appeared in among others Artforum, The Art Newspaper and the Financial Times.

Questions were conducted via email.

Education reforms issued by Dutch government policy around 1999 required art schools to reorganise their department structures, cut down on expenditures and limit the number of incoming students.¹ Although the Gerrit Rietveld Academie managed to ward off excessively drastic measures, the decline of students enrolled in its part-time programme (which was being phased out) and a new public funding system based on the number of enrolled students brought financial difficulties to the educational institution.² Parallel to these developments, the Bologna Process’ declaration of 1999 introduced the bachelor’s master’s doctorate system, which standardised study norms and degrees, and enhanced the international visibility of European education programs. This educational structure matched the Dutch former tweefasenstructuur, which was based on a study trajectory of four years followed by an additional programme of one or two years. At the Rietveld Academie, the Sandberg Instituut (which was originally set up to organise fund-raising for young artists) initiated an experimental tweedefase fine arts programme for Rietveld Academie graduates in 1992/1993, starting out with only six students and gradually growing to sixty-one students in several departments by 2002.³ Eventually the education reforms were slightly altered and the Rietveld Academie decided in 2003 to increase the school’s annual budget by expanding enrolment.⁴

Already in 2000, the Rietveld Academie’s strategic plan De Rietveld. Herstructureringsplan kunstvakonderwijs 2000-2004 mentions that the school had agreed with the municipality of Amsterdam to give the Rietveld Academie a “prominent place” in the urban and cultural planning for the Zuidas district, which included ambitions to realise a building extension, a student campus and designated space for external companies.⁵ The Zuidas is the most important international business and banking centre of the Netherlands, characterised by commercial high-rise around the train and metro station Amsterdam Zuid. Since the Loyens & Loeff office building was erected next to the Rietveld Academie in 2002, the Fred. Roeskestraat has become a site of multiple concurrent residential and office development projects, recently including The Boutique Office, De Fred apartment complex and the Telesto offices.

The Rietveld Academie is operated by the Stichting Gerrit Rietveld Academie, which sold the historic Rietveld building and its property to the municipality of Amsterdam for nine million euro in 2002. In this deal the municipal executive board agreed to issue a long-term leasehold.⁶ The newly obtained funds were used as an investment to restore the historic building and construct a new extension. The Rietveld Academie was consequently expanded with a nine-storey studio building designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects and completed in 2004. In 2006, the Sandberg Instituut was accredited as a master’s degree in fine arts, the first in The Netherlands, resulting in an increase in the amount of international student applications.⁷ Only four years after realising the building extension, following a continued growth of the student population and the possible addition of a number of new master’s programmes, the executive board concluded in 2008 that the school needed more space in both short and long term, as it was intended to join all departments of the bachelor’s and master’s programmes on the same site.⁸ Subsequently, options for both temporary and definitive accommodation were examined.

In 2008 the bachelor’s Fine Arts and VAV departments were temporarily accommodated on the first floor of the GAK office building of the former national social administration service in the district Bos en Lommer.⁹ Shortly after, the executive board of the Rietveld Academie explored the option to divest its Rietveld and Benthem Crouwel buildings on the Fred. Roeskestraat and move the Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut as a whole to the considerably larger GAK building.¹⁰ The plan originated in a meeting between then Rietveld Academie director Tijmen van Grootheest and Ronald Huikeshoven, regional director of real estate developer AM, which is part of construction-services business Koninklijke BAM Groep.¹¹ AM owned the vacant GAK building together with housing corporations Stadgenoot and Rochdale. The municipality of Amsterdam and the urban district’s administration were prepared to provide additional financial support as an investment in the low-income district.¹² As Bos en Lommer was scheduled for urban renewal to increase high-income inhabitants, moving the Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut would provide the municipality with an instrument of dispersive gentrification.¹³ With policy intentions to upgrade this area through simply embedding an art school, the systemic socio-economic factors underlying the urban problems in such a district were blatantly disregarded. When the plan was made public in 2009 through the Rietveld Academie coordinator assembly and the student advisory council it sparked protests from students, teachers and alumni.¹⁴ Then head of the graphic design department Linda van Deursen started an online petition calling to preserve the historic Rietveld building, which was signed by over 3,000 people.¹⁵ In addition to internal affairs, sixty prominent figures in the Dutch art scene sent protest letters to the municipal executive board and the Minister of Education, Culture and Science.¹⁶ On September 10 of 2009 the executive board of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie announced that they had abandoned the plan to move to a new location.¹⁷

The academy’s space shortage became more urgent in 2010 when it expanded with a fourth master’s programme.¹⁸ While working on a structural solution to the accommodation problem, the construction of a third building at the current location on Fred. Roeskestraat proved to be more economical than renting various annex buildings in the immediate vicinity of the academy’s existing buildings, considering the high prices of the Zuidas area.¹⁹ Over the years various bachelor’s and master’s departments have been allocated temporary rented accommodation, such as the Kauwgomballenfabriek on Willem Fenengastraat, Nicolaasklooster on Prinses Irenestraat, the former TNT building across the Fred. Roeskestraat, Generaal Vetterstraat and most recently Overschiestraat, where part of the bachelor’s Fine Arts department and much of the Sandberg Instituut are currently still accommodated. In 2011, the management team of the Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut announced a design competition for students, alumni and teachers of the Rietveld and Sandberg community titled Gerrit & Willem Do-It-Yourself. Studio FedLev, a collective of students and alumni led by architect Paulien Bremmer, was selected in 2012 to expand the premises on Fred. Roeskestraat with a third building. After finalising the design in partnership with Hootsmans Architects, preparations for construction began in 2016. The new property is financed through a loan from the central government and will be owned by the Stichting Gerrit Rietveld Academie.²⁰ The entire project of construction, renovation, and restructuring of departments and workshops has an estimated budget of almost 13 million euros.²¹ The last phase of construction was originally planned for mid 2017, having the academic year 2017/2018 start in a new building.²²

On December 22, 2016, internal newsletter 11 reported a construction delay of the FedLev building due to foundation problems: “The foundation of the building was formed using ‘soil displacing concrete piles’. (…) When the casings were removed the layers of soil pushed the concrete inside, making the piles too narrow in some places and compromising their load-bearing capacity. (…) Although it seemed possible at first to repair the piles, it turns out that additional piles must be driven. (…) Based on experiences with various renovations and moves in the previous years, we have concluded that it is not feasible to move educational departments during the academic year. (…) The idea now is to keep the Overschiestraat for another academic year. In other words, we will not be able to fully occupy the new building until the start of the 2018/2019 academic year.”²³

On January 9, 2017, two faulty concrete foundation piles were removed from the excavated construction site at the Rietveld Academie on Fred. Roeskestraat and installed in storage at the Sandberg Instituut on Overschiestraat. An agreement was signed with the facility management to store the piles at a designated place for material storage until the next academic year, on condition of a € 100 deposit and the eventual compulsory removal of the material.

On December 17, 2017, internal newsletter 15 featured an update on the FedLev building: “At the same time as the building is being completed (scheduled for the end of February 2018), there will also be work on the renovation of the Rietveld/Sandberg site. (…) The renovation of Fred. Roeskestraat by the city authorities will take place at the same time as the works on our site. (…) Between February and the end of April 2018, the city authorities will work on the front side of the Rietveld Academie and Loyens & Loeff buildings.” ²⁴

On March 10, 2018, the foundation piles were removed from storage on Overschiestraat, moved back to Fred. Roeskestraat and installed at the Rietveld Pavilion.

The pavilion is described as a “work, event, project and exhibition space in a glass structure situated in front of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.”²⁵ Originally, the pavilion was designed as an outdoor sculpture workshop. Around 1970 the structure was walled with a glass facade to accommodate the Glass department.²⁶ After the department got its own extension next to the workshop low-rise, the pavilion was used for various purposes. In the original plans for the building’s restoration activities in 2004, it was intended to remove the glass walls and revert the pavilion to its original open design, which ultimately did not happen.²⁷

According to the Rietveld facility services the allowable load-bearing capacity of the pavilion’s foundation is set at a distributed load of 250 kg/m2.²⁸ As a safety measure to prevent shear failure, the pavilion will be closed to visitors during the exhibition.

As part of the opening of the exhibition on March 15, 2018, researcher and urban geographer Cody Hochstenbach was invited to give a presentation on the politics of state-led gentrification.

At the end of 2016 the new Sandberg Instituut building, under construction at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie site in Amsterdam, was delayed by faulty placed concrete foundation piles. A newsletter was sent out:

Gerrit & Willem Do-It-Yourself Newsletter 11, Dec 22, 2016 ¹

Foundation problems delay construction

Unfortunately, we have some bad news to share about the schedule for the new building: due to circumstances beyond our control, construction will be delayed. The following is a brief explanation of the situation.

Foundation piles

The foundation of the building was formed using ‘soil displacing concrete piles’. This involves drilling a bore, installing a casing, placing a reinforcement cage and pouring concrete into the hole, after which the casing is removed. Normally, the result is a foundation pile that is stronger than the soil and displaces it.

After the piles were finished, strength tests were conducted. Doubts arose concerning several piles and the data was presented to an engineering firm, which confirmed the doubts. A major follow-up investigation was subsequently conducted that included a counter expertise review.

Basically, when the casings were removed the layers of soil pushed the concrete inside, making the piles too narrow in some places and compromising their load-bearing capacity. Apparently, there was a lot of pressure in the layers of soil. The final investigation is currently underway to determine exactly how many piles are affected. It looks like quite a few.

Although it seemed possible at first to repair the piles, it turns out that additional piles must be driven. However, the large pile-driving machinery originally used cannot be re-installed because the building excavation site has been dug. A small pile frame is being used instead.

The new method uses driven steel tubular piles. To reach the appropriate depth, a number of piles are stacked atop each other. The casing is not removed; it stays in the structure. These casings are much narrower than the bored piles and therefore more are required in order to achieve the same supporting power.

Delay and consequences

The foundation problem means that we have encountered a delay of several months. The exact delay is currently being calculated.

Based on experiences with various renovations and moves in the previous years, we have concluded that it is not feasible to move educational departments during the academic year. Especially in cases where internal moves were in the works, they would have too much of an impact on the quality of education. Consequently, the idea now is to keep the Overschiestraat for another academic year. In other words, we will not be able to fully occupy the new building until the start of the 2018/2019 academic year. However, we will see whether we will be able to start using parts of the building before then.

This is clearly a case of circumstances beyond our control. No one could have anticipated this and certainly not us, the commissioning party. The contract with the builder includes agreements regarding these types of situations, and therefore we assume the academy will not suffer financially. For us, the main problem is the schedule.