The members of the Indonesian artist collective Ruangrupa presented the concept for the Documenta 15 (official spelling: Documenta fifteen) that they curated. The world’s largest exhibition of contemporary art, at least in terms of visitor numbers, which is scheduled to open in Kassel in summer 2022, will be titled lumbung. What is “lumbung”?
A traditional Indonesian rice barn, as Ruangrupa explains. It is made of bamboo, is thatched and stands on four wooden stakes to protect the harvest from vermin. The omega shape of the facade, as it can be seen in the sketch provided by the artist collective, is typical of the island of Lombok.
Such traditional barns are symbolically charged to a high degree. In the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, there is an Indonesian rice granary from Sulawesi, more than seven meters high, right in the entrance hall – according to the company, the “landmark” of the ethnological museum. “Rice is the staple food in Tana Toraja,” writes the former deputy director, “and rice plays a central role in people’s ritual life.”[1]
Ruangrupa also refers to such rituals. As a store for collectively managed food, the rice barn stands for the “shared use of resources and mutual care”. It is, you have to admit, a beautiful picture that the artist collective has found. They call it an “artistic and economic model”. Who would have something against “values” such as collectivity, generosity, humor or trust? Who wanted to speak out against sharing, sharing resources and promoting the common good? According to Ruangrupa, Lumbung is not just a topic: “Rather, it is deeply inscribed in our everyday practice and summarizes our previous methods and values.”[2] In the drawing, the open space under the barn serves as a meeting point for the village community. There – as you can imagine – people talk, discuss, laugh, celebrate festivals and distribute the harvest fairly. We care for one another and take responsibility together.
That is pretty much the ideal image of the “warm community” as Ferdinand Tönnies had drawn towards the end of the 19th century in a primal sociological scene – albeit for a completely different cultural area – as a counter-image to the anonymous, urban “cold society”. At Tönnies, the community stood for an original sense of security that had been lost in the process of modernity. Historians soon pointed out critically that this imagined harmonious community full of authentic closeness probably never really existed. Even then, such small-minded objections could not harm the attractiveness of the emphatic concept of community and the paradisiacal associations connected with it.
“We believe community is always good,” writes Zygmunt Bauman. “Who would not want to live among friendly and benevolent people whom they trust and whose words they can rely on?” But there is a decisive difference between such community imaginations and the real communities: the latter have their price in the form of a loss of freedom and individuality. They required absolute loyalty and obedience. That is why “the air will soon be stuffy” in real communities.[3]
But some utopias only really thrive when there is a lack of oxygen. The anti-modern utopia of modernity, fed by Rousseauist and romantic longings, of the harmonious life as an ingrown member of a solidary community cast a spell over the most progressive and the most conservative thinkers alike. The National Socialists were just as enthusiastic about it as the Communists. And so Helmuth Plessner’s earlier suspicion that in the ideal of the community there could be a tendency towards totalitarianism,[4] confirmed rather than absent-minded. The fact that “after the experiences of the 20th century, in which the concept of the community served to legitimize authoritarian systems of rule”, has lost none of its power of fascination to this day, is, therefore, as the editors of a current anthology state, “at least in need of explanation”.[5]
The members of Ruangrupa, it is evident, are free from such historical doubts. But maybe one of the strengths of art is that it can grab something old and contaminated and pretend it was something completely new and fresh: Hey, how about living in a harmonious community – wouldn’t that be entirely wonderful and gorgeous? The question remains whether the barn (lumbung) is even a suitable symbol for this.
Collective folklore
Call Judith Schlehe. She is director of the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Freiburg and specializes in Indonesia. She is amazed at the use of “lumbung” as a metaphor for community and solidarity. In fact, there are rice barns all over Indonesia in very different forms. However, none of them served as communal storage facilities, but are still part of the building ensembles of the elites, she explains. “So they do not stand for redistribution, but on the contrary for an enormously stratified society with great inequalities.”
In contrast, what existed in the first decades of the 20th century – and Ruangrupa could possibly have in mind – were “lumbung desa,” rural rice storage facilities that functioned as a kind of “microcredit system” (sloe) – somewhat comparable to the Raiffeisen movement in Germany. This “lumbung desa” was introduced by the Dutch colonial rulers to counteract the extreme impoverishment of the Indonesian population that they caused. But that too has nothing to do with a traditional solidarity community; rather, access to the barns was strictly regulated by the colonial administration. In the villages themselves, according to Schlehe, there is hardly any memory of these symbols of colonialism today.
Apparently, lumbung would have what it takes to be an extremely interesting metaphor. In the picture of the rice barn, the ambivalences that the utopia of community holds in store to this day could become visible.
The strange processes in which traditions are invented, but whose originality is nevertheless firmly believed, could also be addressed – and with it the complicated entanglements of identity. One would like to know more about who in Indonesia dreams the dream of lumbung and for what reasons – and who is more likely to get nightmares from it.
And last but not least, the question could be asked what actually happens to this Asian rural idyll in the translation process between Lombok and the Karlsauen. Could it be that something that can actually be utopian in a “flawed democracy” and under the conditions of restricted freedom of the press will[6] become collective folklore in the Kassel art village? Judith Schlehe formulates this more cautiously: “Here there is, of course, the danger of self-orientation.”
From a western perspective, Ruangrupa with lumbung also follows on from well-known promises of art. In small, committed communities – in the 19th century in artist colonies such as Barbizon or Worpswede, later on Monte Verità or at Black Mountain College – communal life was tried out on a small scale. And even if these were really social exclaves, it was still a promise of art that models for future societies would be developed here. For a few years now, this idea of community has once again picked up speed as “commoning” in art.[7]
In the history of art, on the other hand, barns stood for retreat and solitude rather than community. In the 20th century, writers and painters moved into former agricultural buildings in order to finally have some peace and quiet – but of course also because it was cheaper to live in the country. Ralph Waldo Ellison retired to a barn in Vermont in the summer of 1945 and began his novel, Invisible Man, there. Jackson Pollock performed his now-famous painting dances, in which he spread large amounts of household paint on horizontal canvases, in a barn in Springs on the east end of Long Island. It is now a listed building and a place of pilgrimage for fans of Abstract Expressionism.
“Hardly any other building structure is as insignificant as it is symbolically charged at the same time,” wrote Christoph Engemann about barns. In them will not accustomed to, and held nevertheless need people in a barn, then will override “the social order. Festivals, illegitimate love affairs, vagabonds, suicides, monsters and zombies can be found here,”[8] And from time to time, could complement each other, you met and still meet lonely artists there.
Cosmopolitan communitarianism
In fact, the barn currently seems to be subject to a dramatic symbolic revaluation process. It can be read tentatively from a chain of coffee shops called »The Barn«, which has been expanding in Berlin for several years. The counter and shelves of the branch in Mitte are made of wide wooden planks, and the unfinished concrete floor is also supposed to evoke associations of rustic character, which is, however, disturbed by the chic Farrow & Ball gray of the walls. The young, cosmopolitan clientele is evidently recruited from the public in the surrounding galleries; you wouldn’t be surprised to see one or the other face again next year at the Documenta. The cappuccino is routinely ordered in English, and everyone knows that you can only pay with a card here.
It goes without saying that such an espresso shop has its own philosophy. One can only guess what part the barn plays in it; It has something to do with “sustainable”, but also – and this is where it starts to get interesting for us – with the community. Extract from the website: »By sharing our knowledge, we connect our coffee communities with our coffee producers. We are completely transparent and authentic. We spend a lot of time in the country of origin, but it’s just as important to be part of our local community. «
Obviously, the lingua franca of global communitarianism is spoken here. “What does it mean nowadays to be rooted locally and globally, and what potential is locality currently opening up?” No, the quote does not come from the website of the coffee shop, but from a press release by Ruangrupa. Amazingly, the barn mutates into a symbol of communitarianism, the contours of which remain puffy in both cases. It is no longer artist hermits, stealthy lovers or tramps that gather under its roof, but rather the urban neo-community of the new academic middle class, as described by Andreas Reckwitz in The Society of Singularities. Its members are deeply rooted and yet without obligation, here and there, globally and locally, feel enormously connected to the world and to the artist or coffee farmer elsewhere and to his buddies and customers at home, take responsibility, freely share »resources« and »knowledge« .
Unlike in the past, when ideals such as self-realization and creativity were first applied in the art context and then gradually turned into imperatives for society as a whole, this time it is probably the other way around: art no longer sets the tone, rather it seems to be in tune with a melody that has long been trumpeted by chocolate bar producers and airlines. Today, every chemical giant, every major bank and every coffee house chain is eager to conserve resources, support local communities, and uphold “values such as collectivity, trust, transparency” (Ruangrupa).
And aesthetically, the rustic is unfortunately already occupied. After a visit to The Barn, Niklas Maak wrote that the barn had, strangely enough, become the aesthetic paradigm of the big city. Everywhere in the gentrified centers, there is rough sawn wood and “locally manufactured” things, the city looks like a pre-modern village. “The city, which took once with the promise of huge, glittering, open, turbulent, modern, steel, glass, to be electrically and wild, is ruralized in a way of verländlicht that it cracks in the woodwork.”[9]
But if art collectives and Coffee house chains speak the same language, represent the same “values” and, above all, share the same symbols – what does that mean for art? Shouldn’t clever curators react to the devaluation of terms and symbols instead of naively or defiantly replicating them? It remains to be seen what forms Ruangrupa will find for her vision of a contemporary barn. In any case, there is a risk that lumbung will not lead to the dreamed-of pastoral community, but straight into the cracking entablature of The Barn.
From rice storage to art barn
While lumbung is still being planned in Kassel, it is already being built in Berlin. Today museums too prefer to be barns. For a long time it was thought that “barn” was a denigration of the new museum of the 20th century, invented by the opponents of the design by the architects Herzog & de Meuron. In fact, that’s what the builders themselves call their 450 million euro project. The concrete and brick monster that is to be built by 2026 has already been referred to by the architects as a hangar or temple, and mocked by opponents as a warehouse and shopping mall – and all of this seems to better reflect the formal as well as the ideological core of the building far better. But “Die Scheune” has prevailed. In press releases and interviews there is a lot of talk about the openness of the draft – it addresses “people directly”. As a “place that should be open to as many people and social and cultural activities as possible. In other words, as a ‘heterotopic’ place”, at least that is what the architect Jacques Herzog wants the museum to be, with a somewhat bumpy Foucault reference.[10]
The barn is not a form of architecture that would address people directly, and the museum, as an institution, is committed to very few social activities, which this building will not change. But the weighting of these activities is likely to shift further under the gable roof of the barn. Strolling, meeting, shopping, going to restaurants and drinking coffee will increase, while viewing art will decrease.
You can already see at the Tate Modern in London that this doesn’t have to be a disadvantage. The barn as a “weak organization between inside and outside” (Engemann) could meet the increased need for architectural forms that expand the public space inwards even better than an old power station. And even if conservative critics naturally want to see a sign of decay in this, in which the classic “confrontation with the work”, “collective self-expression”,[11] gives way to the positive effects that seem to me to outweigh them: less sacred silence, more conversation, less tense idolatry of art, more casual sociability. You just shouldn’t be disappointed if not “all” people come together in the new barn at the Kulturforum, but above all the well-known cosmopolitan communitarians who can also be found in the Tate Modern, at the Documenta or in The Barn.
NOTES
[1] Jutta Engelhard, A new roof for the rice granary from Tana Toraja in the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum. In: Kölner Museums-Bulletin, No. 1/2008.
[2] Documenta fifteen and lumbung practice. Statement by Ruangrupa from June 18, 2020 (documenta-fifteen.de/pressemitteilungen/ documenta-fifteen-und-lumbung-praxis /).
[3] Zygmunt Bauman, Communities. In search of security in a threatening world. Translated from the English by Frank Jakubzik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2009.
[4] Helmuth Plessner, Frontiers of the Community [1924]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2002.
[5] Alfred Schäfer / Christiane Thompson (eds.), Community. Paderborn: Schöningh 2019.
[6] See The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Demography Index (infographics.economist. Com / 2021 / democracy-index-2020 / index.html).
[7] See, for example, Anette Baldauf et al. (Ed.), Spaces of Commoning. Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday. Berlin: Sternberg 2016.
[8] Christoph Engemann, Settlements between the past and the future. In: MerkurBlog from November 16, 2016 (www.merkur-zeitschrift.de/2016/11/16/siedeln- Zwischenvergangenheit-und-zukunft-anmeretzungen-zu-herzogde-meurons-entwurf-fuer-das-kulturforum/).
[9] Niklas Maak, victory of the barn. In: FAS of February 9, 2020.
[10] See the interview with Jacques Herzog in the 1/2021 issue of the propaganda leaflet Das Magazin of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.
[11] Rüdiger Bubner, Aesthetic Experience and the New Role of Museums. In: Joachim Küpper / Christoph Menke, Dimensions of Aesthetic Experience. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2003.