In the past two decades, more than in the past hundred years, authoritarian regimes have risen to power globally. Today, fascist parties are occupying seats in many countries’ governments, such as in the Israeli Knesset, the Dutch Tweede Kamer, the American Congress, and the German Bundestag. Meanwhile, the collective memory of European fascism and its impact on shaping global art institutions, and in particular the documenta exhibition, has been mostly ignored.
In June 2021, a groundbreaking exhibition opened at the German Historical Museum in Berlin (Deutsches Historisches Museum). It examined the history of the first ten documenta exhibitions held between 1955 and 1997.1 It reflected Germany’s political, cultural, and social development during that time. documenta is a major exhibition with international aspirations that became one of the strategies through which the image of West Germany was reshaped. Unfortunately, the exhibition, at least in its earlier reiterations, continued the country’s dark past which it had sought to overcome. According to the exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, nearly half of the organizers of the first documenta were members of the Nazi Party, the SA, or the SS.2
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment includes a chapter titled “Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.”3 Written in the early 1940s, the chapter opposes the increasing influence of entertainment industries, the commercialization of art, and the unification of “culture,” particularly in the United States, where both authors had emigrated. Horkheimer and Adorno critically examine a wide range of arts through the concept of the culture industry, which was foreign to their time, expressing skepticism towards new media such as radio and cinema. Dialectic of Enlightenment became a cornerstone in the mass culture criticism of the 1970s, as it not only discussed different aspects of enlightenment but also rejected the “economy of culture.” Thus, the balance point of the discussion shifted from an emphasis on art and aesthetics to the false diversity of cultural output in late capitalism.
This essay draws attention to the reciprocal relationships between the cultural industries, socially engaged art, cultural policy, and the economy of friendships. It highlights Dutch cultural imperialism and the symbiotic relationships between ruangrupa, the Van Abbemuseum, and Arts Collaboratory. I argue that documenta 15 (d15) was a showcase for DOEN Foundation (Stichting DOEN) to present its achievement to future clients and peers in cultural entrepreneurship and development industries. Thus, ruangrupa’s action should be understood as part of a broader movement that turns citizens into entrepreneurs, creation into production, and art into an industry.
The work of art in the age of philanthropy
The Indonesian artists collective ruangrupa was founded in Jakarta in January 2000 by Ade Darmawan, Hafiz, Ronny Agustinus, Oky Arfie Hutabarat, Lilia Nursita, dan Rithmi di. The establishment of the collective can be attributed to the fall of Suharto’s “New Order” authoritarian regime, which ruled Indonesia from 1966 until 1998, and in the spirit of the political liberalization and reforms carried out by the new Indonesian government. Aside from this shift in domestic policy, the other catalyst was financial support from the Netherlands.
In 1998, the Intergovernmental Conference for Cultural Policies for Development was held in Stockholm under the auspices of UNESCO. In the panel, which included, among others, Okwui Enwezor, David Elliott, and Sune Nordgren, it was decided that long-term artist residency programs provide a contemporary response to the concept of the global village.
Today, we are living in a post-colonial and post-national era, and it is very important to find a new format of cultural diversity. One way is to allow a subjective perspective, an individual view, based upon experience, field work and research. The exhibition curator, the museum director or the artist-in-residence programme co-ordinator, can play a vital role in this as a mediator between stereotypes of different sort.4
According to the organizers’ web records, the conference ended with:
[a] key message of the World Commission on Culture and Development had been fully endorsed, each speaker having recognized both the ‘Power of Culture’ as a basic constitutive element in human development and the corresponding imperative to protect, nurture and transmit that the power of culture was seen to be at the heart of the matter as regards crucial issues of identity, well-being, governance, citizenship, and creativity.5
The “Power of Culture” was originally the title of a seminar held in the Netherlands with the World Commission for Culture and Development in 1996. Interestingly, the same title is also used for a platform about culture and development initiated by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.6 The platform offered a list of projects, initiatives, and objectives of Dutch organizations active in the area of culture and development. Gertrude Flentge was among the website editors.7
In the spirit of the “Power of Culture” and to expand the international outreach of the Netherlands, the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (National Academy of Fine Arts) in Amsterdam established a network for artists initiatives named RAIN (Rijksakademie Artists Initiatives Network).8 The network was established with support from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry for Development Cooperation, and two organizations: Hivos (a humanist institution for cooperation with developing countries) and DOEN Foundation (an entrepreneurial foundation operating in developing countries).9 Together, these institutions offered financial support to Rijksakademie graduates who wanted to establish artist residency programs in their home countries. Ade Darmawan, the founding member of ruangrupa, joined RAIN along with other Rijksakademie graduated artists from the Global South, including Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, Mali, India, and others.
Apart from the desire to expand international activities and promote artistic research and experimentation, the stated goal of RAIN was to support the creation of connections between cultural activists from the Global South and cultural activists from the Global North.10
Members of RAIN created joint exhibitions and conferences and hosted each other’s activities. Although the platform was named Artists’ Initiative, the establishment of RAIN was a product of the Dutch cultural policy apparatus, and not a response to demands arising from the ground. The seeds sown at the beginning of the new millennium continue to nourish those involved until today. Thus, the same people who met at the Rijksakademie between 1999 and 2004 (RAIN operated for only four years) played a major role in d15. Gertrude Flentge, the project manager of RAIN and the editor of ‘Power of Culture’, was a member of the artistic team of the last documenta; Charles Esche, the current director of Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, and Philippe Pirotte taught at Rijksakademie in these years, and both were members of the finding committee as well as the advisory committee of d15.
The cultural turn in the field of international development programs began in the 1990s. Culture, either understood as a collective way of life in the anthropological sense, or as a symbolic representation in the artistic sense, was seen as a central element in efforts towards economic and political developments. Development interventions are, fundamentally, cultural: they are an act of ideological exportation and cultural imperialism. Often, developing countries do not have the necessary resources to reject such interventions and their technocratic language, norms, and value judgments brought by their direct application.
However, the “Power of Culture” in the context of development programs can be understood in different ways. Those with an instrumental approach argue that art contributes to extra-artistic processes such as peacemaking in conflict zones, effective communication of educational messages, and economic growth originating from cultural tourism and creative industries. Others argue that the cultural sector opens an important critical public space for creating more just and democratic societies. Some post-colonial critics go even further, arguing that art in the countries of the Global South is related to its ability to establish an alternative creative space that goes beyond the usual economic development spaces, a space not limited to the crises and flaws of development policy, from which “development recipients” can build their alternative cultural imaginations. Therefore, funds that support artistic practices but reject a merely instrumental approach embrace the existing possibilities in the intersection of art and economic development instead of only legitimizing the development agenda through the promotion of certain cultural values.
The Arts Collaboratory (AC) was established in 2007 by DOEN Foundation and Hivos. The conceptual framework and declared objectives of the new network were similar to those of RAIN: to enable knowledge exchanges between artistic initiatives from the countries of the Global South and support young artists where state support does not exist. From its establishment, AC focused on the development of astute art (the instrumental approach.) Yet, in 2016 it underwent a reflective turn that transformed its agenda, exploring the role of art in social change through critical research. Soon after, AC claimed that it “aspires to be a unique form of an international art network and organizational practices that experiment with various collaborative structures and is committed to working closely with all participating organizations.”11
The AC report for the years 2013-2015 states that in the last twenty years, there has been a change in the structure of philanthropic activities. Keeping up with this transformation, AC sought to rethink their work following the contributions of authors such as Dambisa Moyo12 and Linsey McGoey,13 who argue that traditional philanthropy methods only exacerbate social inequality and that many philanthropic organizations echo post-colonial structures, leaving power and money in the hands of a small number of wealthy individuals, usually Westerners.
Indeed, many anthropologists were calling for the abandonment or the ideological dismantling of the epistemological and political field of “development,” moving towards a “post-development” era. They claim that development discourse operates from a hegemonic worldview based on a representational regime that shapes and builds identities for the peoples of the “developing world,” and does not allow the non-Western peoples to think for themselves about alternative principles of organization to achieve their well-being. Critics who are particularly identified with “post-developmental” criticism are Arturo Escobar, Wolfgang Sachs, Majid Rahnema, and Victoria Bawtree.,
The criticism of the traditional model of philanthropic activity led Hivos to stop its support, while DOEN remained as AC’s main financial support. AC changed its structure and objectives and developed a new model designed to reduce central control “based on something that can be called cooperative ownership, in which the actors take on more responsibility, and the emphasis is on shared responsibility and long-term involvement and trust.”14 The key is to build a fundamentally different practice centered on interpersonal relationships, knowledge sharing, and experience.15 From 2016, it was decided that each member of the AC ecosystem would receive EUR 75,000 per year for five years, of which EUR 25,000 were allocated for regular activities and AC working groups.
By the end of the five years, in 2020, the funding of AC by DOEN ended. Thus, the AC ecosystem, with its twenty-five member organizations, had to find new ways to sustain its activities.
Fourteen members of this ecosystem have participated in d15. The cooperative ownership led to DOEN being mentioned on five different pages of the d15 website.16 Two of them feature Gertrude Flentge, who works at DOEN and manages AC. DOEN is also mentioned on the page listing the sponsors of d15 and is listed as one of the participating artists in the exhibition. The new horizontal model abolished the hierarchy between DOEN’s staff and AC members, and between DOEN and AC artists’ initiatives. This blurred the power relation between the one that has and the one that has not, creating an absurd situation where DOEN, a philanthropic organization with an annual income of EUR 32 million, is listed as a participating artist in an exhibition alongside individual artists, collectives, and groups. Perhaps not only listed as an artist but also receiving its share of the d15 budget, together with the rest of the participants?
Can a fund that provides money for development programs and supports artistic processes really contribute to the invention of a space that will create an alternative to development as such?
In 2015, the Centre for Development Innovation in Wageningen published a report presenting the civil society findings regarding ruangrupa in Indonesia, continuing an initial assessment made in 2012 about the group’s contribution to the reconstruction of civil society. According to the report, since its establishment, ruangrupa has played a strategic role in providing information on the development of artist initiatives in Indonesia. “They built their credibility as a progressive organization of visual art, consistently presenting alternative positions on contemporary urban art compared to many other artist initiatives.”17
To sustain ruangrupa activities between the end of 2010 and the end of 2013, Hivos supports ruangrupa with the amount of EUR 105,000 and DOEN with EUR 95,000. Ford Foundation supported ruangrupa between 2009-2011 with USD 125,000 and in total between 2009-2024 with USD 2.025.000.
In the article “Who Cares a Lot? ruangrupa as Curatorship” David Teh writes:
It would be lazy to call their collaborative house style ‘inclusive’. Ruangrupa is shareware, their partnering indiscriminate — witness the soup of logos on their sponsor rolls. They tap every level of the institutional food chain, with a reach only possible in the last decade or so: from foreign NGOs and municipal and national governments, down to the humblest grassroots initiatives — a big tobacco company here, a national media network there, a small business around the corner.18
Over these years, ruangrupa gradually established its reputation in Indonesia and around the world, set up commercial venues or non-profit venues in Jakarta, developed collaborations, and worked with communities on a variety of exhibitions and projects. Initially, their work was tied to Jakarta, but to strengthen their standing among organizations with interests across Southeast Asia, they needed to build regional, national, and international networks. This made the collective gain international recognition, advising international funds such as the Danish CKU and the British Council, etc.
ruangrupa exhibits a unique approach – it always starts from the point of human relationships and friendships, knows how to organize huge events of quality art, and how to influence masses of people. Informality and playfulness go hand in hand with critical and strategic thinking. As a result, ruangrupa has become an example and a model for artists and collectives in Indonesia and beyond. Moreover, today it has a direct influence on policymakers at the government level. Members of ruangrupa are part of the Jakarta Arts Council, and ruangrupa is also a driving force in the Indonesian Art Coalition. In fact, it is not surprising. Who wouldn’t want to influence large numbers of people having fun (seriously) with friends?“19
I first encountered ruangrupa at the 4th Gwangju Biennale (P_A_U_S_E) held in 2002. At that time, I was the director of the Digital Art Lab in Holon, and the collective was invited to participate in the Biennale alongside artist groups and collectives running alternative art centers from 31 countries. The curators of the Biennale, Hou Hanru, Charles Esche, and Woon-Kyung Sung, sought “to promote communication among the participating groups and to take a break from the continuous search for individual artists.” They explained that “P_A_U_S_E emphasizes the contributions of artist initiatives and collectives or independent organizations, particularly from Europe and Asia, and points to the importance of these groups as an integral factor in the narrative of contemporary art.”20
Seven artists from ruangrupa participated in the 4th Gwangju Biennale and presented installations, video works, self-published magazines, and books. On the opening day of the exhibition, in ruangrupa’s display space, food was laid out for the visitors. After the participants and visitors finished eating, the food remnants were not cleared away but were left there until the end of the exhibition. ruangrupa, like the other groups that participated in the exhibition, recreated not only the space in which they operated but also the types of activities that characterized them. At that time, they operated from a house in Jakarta that served the group members for work, display, and living. The curators of the Gwangju Biennale proposed to replicate the working space of each of the participating groups in the Biennale hall and then allow each group to curate an exhibition in the space allocated to them. They also aimed to invite as many artists as possible within the given budget. The exhibition catalog stated:
Our plan is for the exhibition to grow as a living process where, until the last moment, we will not know what will happen in the spaces curated by the artists themselves or how they will coexist alongside each other. Many of the spaces will host lectures and conferences during the Biennale. We will deal with continuous discourse and dynamic relationships between all these components. We need to be prepared to explore how to keep all possibilities open without descending into chaos.21
The curatorial concept of the 4th Gwangju Biennale can be read as a product of the third wave of institutional critique, or, as curator Jonas Ekeberg called it, the “new institutionalism” that came as a response to the institutional critique prevalent in since the 1960s. “We need to create a structure that can be called a creative bureaucracy,” wrote the biennale curators, “where we all need to find our creative engine and initiate ideas. Especially in the Asia-Pacific region, where many countries seek to start up events, biennials, and other activities, there is a real opportunity to invent new forms of these things.”22 Understandably, the curators’ aspiration was not limited to one specific Biennale; they aspired to create a master plan for future large international exhibitions. Indeed, ruangrupa’s proposal for d15 was strikingly similar to that of the 4th Gwangju Biennale, yet on a much larger scale.
My next encounter with ruangrupa was in 2013 at the 31st São Paulo Biennale, where I served on the curatorial team. The collective was invited for a short visit to São Paulo to propose a project for the Biennale. The Biennale’s education department and one of the two local associate curators, who was the artistic programmer of Casa do Povo (People’s House) in the city, made the necessary connection between ruangrupa and local artists and activists. In their Biennale pavilion, they placed a hybrid architectural-sculptural structure that included a scout tent with a karaoke unit, bookshelves, and memorabilia representing the activities and experiences of the collective during their stay in São Paulo.
A year later, Darmawan established the Jakarta Biennale Foundation, which, prior to this, was being managed by the Jakarta Arts Council (JAC). Charles Esche was invited to curate the Biennale in its new management. In the same year, ruangrupa was chosen to curate the Sonsbeek Festival 2016, an international exhibition of contemporary arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands. The history of the Sonsbeek festival begins in 1949—years before the first documenta in Kassel. Likewise, the Sonsbeek festival was also designed to restore the city and support its inhabitants after the Second World War.23
Over the years, ruangrupa has gained respect in the Indonesian culture scene and has gone from being the alternative, to influencing the establishment and, finally, becoming the establishment itself. Strengthening civil society in developing countries means weakening state mechanisms to allow international aid organizations to continue to be relevant. The ways in which the Dutch government and its proxies, in the form of a museum director or philanthropic fund, chose Darmawan as an ally or an agent of its policy replicates the colonial operation pattern of the East India and West India companies. These companies chose allies in the colonies with whom they signed trade and control treaties and provided protection and profits. To ensure that the treaties were not violated, they maintained the power of their allies against other rising forces.
Foreign Cultural Policy
The Dutch approach for supporting former colonies is mainly aimed to build and strengthen “civil society.” The executive summary issued by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes the foreign policy of the Netherlands towards the Global South and the reasons why the Ministry adopted the ‘Theory of Change’ as a working method with civil society. In short, this decision was made to overcome the criticism of unequal donor-recipient relations. It points out that in order to advance the political role of civil society, the choice to work with this framework was made because it could be adapted to different contexts and updated based on changes and new insights. This choice also had consequences for planning, monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems.24
Theory of Change (ToC) was adopted along the chain of the Dutch Civil Society and development organizations and also infiltrated into d15’s visual aesthetics. Throughout d15, flowcharts were on display by different collectives as an aesthetic motif with lifeline planning. The first required step in working with the ToC is to visually represent the desired changes through flowcharts, diagrams, or pictorial graphics, showing why a particular actor’s participation in certain initiatives will produce the change that the actor wishes to see. The pathway of ruangrupa, along the pathways of other groups, were presented all over d15 in the same way as it was presented over the years to the Dutch civil society regulators.
The Dutch presence at d15 opened a new gateway between the former empire and its subjects. The Dutch Empire held Indonesia as a colony until the mid-1940s. In the 1960s, it returned as a major player in the country’s aid and development market—maintaining positions of power and control not as a legacy of the past, but as an ongoing reality in the present.
The cultural industries foster “creativity”—the raw material from which they feed. The content is worthless in itself, its uniqueness is unimportant, as long as the creative potential to spin straw into gold is preserved. And if it is not a room full of straw at the top of a tower, then it is a rice barn. ruangrupa collective was chosen to curate d15 because they know how to turn an exhibition into an event that attracts an audience. Philippe Pirotte, a member of the selection committee, told ArtNews:
We have appointed ruangrupa because they have demonstrated the ability to appeal to various communities, including groups that go beyond pure art audiences, and to promote local commitment and participation. Their curatorial approach is based on an international network of local community-based art organizations.25
I first learned about AC when the network participants set up a metaphorical tent at Casa do Povo alongside the 31st São Paulo Biennial. Later, AC presented as part of various exhibitions, acting as a satellite to the main events.26 Ironically, in the context of a friends’ network, AC was following its members’ invitations to exhibit at an international art event to set up a satellite event and extend the AC network through the success of its members. AC gained artistic validity over time, which reflects on DOEN’s philanthropic activities, that is judged through a moral lens, reach out and participation.27 Other places where AC pitched were Jakarta Biennale in 2015, Art Festival 2014 KLA, Climate Change Summit, ArtCOP21 2015, Creative Time Summit @ Venice Biennale 2015, Opening Venice Biennial 2015, FAIVA Festival 2015, and Colombia Art Fair 2015.
Today, cultural value is measured by participation: the bigger the numbers, the bigger the success. Surveys examining quantitative data of art events are not new; in July 2023, the documenta organization published a survey on d15. The organization checked, among other things, the global reputation of documenta as a brand, the structure of visitors, and their origin. Visitors from 86 countries were among those surveyed, and the overall composition of the d15 audience was less international than at previous documenta exhibitions. The largest shares of foreign visitors came from the Netherlands (16.4%) and Switzerland (10.5%), followed by Austria (7%), France (6.3%), the United Kingdom (6.3%), and the United States (6.3%).
Epilogue: Make friends, not art
Two days before the closing day of d15, on September 23-24, 2022, the symposium “(un) Common Grounds” was held in Amsterdam, the “home field” of d15, and far from German media and politicians. The symposium was hosted by the municipal gallery Framed Framer and supported by the University of Amsterdam and the Van Abbemuseum. The event was divided into four sessions, with film screenings and live discussions involving local and online audiences. Despite being open to the public, a few days after its conclusion, the video documentation of the symposium disappeared from the internet, and a shortened version was uploaded to the internet.28
Dutch artist and critic Jack Segbars, who attended the symposium, published his impressions, writing about the impossibility of separating the organizing body of documenta from ruangrupa’s curatorial and artistic proposal.29 He argued that the discussion about the exhibition must also include its funders, who, in his opinion, acted as a “meta-curator.” He stated that, “[i]f the goal is indeed to fundamentally break the myth of art’s autonomy and the extraordinary economy of art, the question remains how to return this potential to the political arena of the institutions.”30
Segbars refers to the ability of public organizations supporting culture to dictate what is produced and exhibited in art events, museums and galleries, especially in welfare states, where subsidies are distributed according to policy.
In the Netherlands, ‘Autonomous Art’ is celebrated as a fundamental and radical value associated with artmaking, highlighting the paradox that art in the Netherlands must depend on state subsidy for its sustenance. Nowhere this contradiction is as visible as when ruangrupa adopts Castoriadis’s concept of anti-capitalist autonomy. By proposing an alternative economic model within the larger neoliberal framework, they inadvertently underscore the impossibility of maintaining artistic autonomy within the realities of economic dependence on the state and state-funded agencies within the art world.
To distribute documenta’s budget equally among all exhibition participants, ruangrupa must be detached from philanthropic funding bodies; otherwise, the cycle of dependency on neoliberal stakeholders will not be broken.31
Contradictions about the autonomy of art versus the economic power of art institutions were also noticeable throughout the “(un) Common Grounds” symposium, particularly during the first panel, which featured Ade Darmawan, Gertrude Flentge, Lara Khaldi, and Charles Esche. During the conversation Flentge told Khaldi: “If we’re talking about Israel and Palestine—the institution and the Lumbung—[…] Israel represents the institution, and the institution represents capitalism; Palestine represents the Lumbung, and the Lumbung represents resistance out of friendship and solidarity.”32 This is a somewhat odd analogy, considering that both Flentge and Khaldi were employees of documenta for more than two years.
After the symposium, Flentge returned to her post as a project manager at DOEN33 and Khaldi was announced as the new director of De Appel34 a day after the symposium ended, together with d15.
It is then no surprise that ruangrupa’s success helps DOEN35 lure new preys: Flentge has already visited Mali to create new collaborations within the framework of the 2021-2024 Netherlan’s cultural policy.36 It is likely that in the coming years, biennials, museums, and art centers will host exhibitions with similar approaches to collectivism. d15 paved the way for the culture and creative industries to move from the peripheries of developing countries to the core of institutions in the developed ones.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art-and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.37
Notes:
*This essay was published in Theory and Criticism 58, Summer 2023. Van Leer Institute Press. Editor: Shaul Setter.