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Understanding Constant's New Babylon: a Place That Can Never

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Understanding Constant's New Babylon: a Place That Can Never Understanding Constant’s New Babylon: A Place That Can Never Be? Figure 1: Constant in his workplace at Wittenburg, Amsterdam, with several works from his New Babylon project, 1967. Image: Leonard Freed/Magnum/Hollandse Hoogte Jip Hinten Student Number: 10474617 Master Kunstgeschiedenis Supervisor: Dr. Marga van Mechelen Reader: Dr. Christa Maria Lerm Hayes Date submitted: 2 February 2017 Universiteit van Amsterdam Word Count: 22,308 Hinten 2 Summary The objective of this text is to add to and correct several understandings of the Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuy’s life project New Babylon on which he worked for almost two decades, from roughly 1957 until 1974. The main incentive for this research has been the finding that while the project New Babylon has been studied by many scholars during and long after Constant worked on it, this has not only lead to a thorough understanding of the project, but also to the exact opposite. As New Babylon is structured around several paradoxical ideas and concepts such as freedom and control, reality and fantasy, art and society, several generalizations have been made that represent the project in a far too simplistic way. Among these more general interpretations of New Babylon there seem to be two stances: New Babylon should be considered as reality, and, New Babylon should be considered as a fiction. While both these singular interpretations of the project are problematic in themselves, it is especially distressing that the first of the two stance seems to have been getting the upper hand. The goal of this text is thus to add to the collective effort of grasping the meaning, function, and usefulness of Constant’s New Babylon. The question posed by the title of this thesis “a place that can never be?” is meant as a starting point for a more thorough investigation of the project New Babylon itself, as well as other artistic projects. Besides thoroughly analysing Constant’s project, on a more general level, I wish to point out important similarities across various artistic practices, artists, and artworks, and in this process shed light on some of their differences as well. To do so, this text has been divided into three chapters. Chapter one, called Revisiting New Babylon, consists of an extensive analysis of Constant’s New Babylon project, approaching it from an art historical rather than an architectural point of view. The project will be placed within a broader societal perspective as well, to demonstrate how on the one hand society has influenced New Babylon, but also how Constant has influenced society with New Babylon. Besides addressing the society out of which New Babylon emerged, the focus of my argument lies with the art historical context out of which it originates. Constants involvement with the Cobra movement and Situationist International are addressed, along with the influence of contemporary theorists, among whom two of the most important are Asger Jorn and Aldo van Eyck. The main question this section addresses is what new insights we can gain from removing New Babylon from the architectural realm it has been wrongfully placed in, and instead analyse it as an inherently artistic project. Chapter two, called Presenting New Babylon Today, positions Constant’s project within the twenty-first century. It will begin by providing a brief retrospective of Hinten 3 several exhibitions of New Babylon, to analyse the different ways in which the project has previously been presented. While Constant’s exhibitions of New Babylon have often been object to studies, they have not yet been thoroughly analysed altogether. Furthermore, this chapter includes a close reading of the New Babylon exhibition held at the Gemeentemuseum The Hague in 2016, as well as the concurrent exhibition held at the Cobra museum in Amstelveen. In exploring these most recent exhibitions in relation to past exhibitions, I have analysed whether the project is in fact presented differently than it has been before, and what those differences are. Has the focus on New Babylon shifted from the field of architecture to the field of visual art? And does this presentation of the project within the socio-political context of the twenty-first century provide room for new understandings of the New Babylon? Does it provide a context from which New Babylon can be approached within our contemporary society? The final Chapter, The Aftermath of New Babylon, begins by briefly analysing the relation between art and social change. After this it provides several examples of works of art and artistic practices that are either directly inspired by Constants New Babylon, or elaborate on very similar ideas. The artists and collectives that are discussed include: Los Carpinteros, Carsten Höller, Zoë Walker & Neil Bromwich, and Atelier Van Lieshout. By highlighting the similarities and differences of these projects, my aim is to evaluate the influence New Babylon has had on the art world, as well as emphasise the uniqueness and scope of the project once again. In this text I am thus not only concerned with providing a thorough revision of Constant’s New Babylon once again, but aim to do so from a different point of view than has been done before, to add to the vast scholarly field exploring the oeuvre of Constant, by claiming the necessity to understand New Babylon, for it to be at least in part, an artistic project. Hinten 4 Table of Contents Summary…………………………………………………………………...p. 3 Introduction………………………………………………………………..p. 7 Chapter 1: Revisiting New Babylon…………………………………...p. 15 1.1 Constant Nieuwenhuys: Provocateur until the End p. 16 1.2 The road to New Babylon: From CoBrA to Situationist p. 24 International 1.3 New Babylon: Creativity as Highest Ideal p. 38 1.4 Beyond Art: New Babylon and Society p. 49 Chapter 2: Presenting New Babylon Today………………………….p. 59 2.1 Exhibiting New Babylon: A Retrospective p. 64 2.2 New Babylon anno 2016 p. 73 Chapter 3: The Aftermath of New Babylon…………………………..p. 82 3.1 Art and/as Social Change p. 84 3.2 Utopian Art After New Babylon p. 95 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………p. 106 Bibliography p. 110 Hinten 5 Acknowledgements After working on this thesis for almost a year, it has finally come to an end. I could not have finished it without the help and support of the several people. For that I hereby say thank you all. I would like to thank one person in particular here, namely my supervisor Marga van Mechelen. Thank you for your endless patience, valuable critical input, and support the past months. Hinten 6 Introduction I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start.1 Utopia: an ideal place that can never be. It was Sir Thomas More who coined the term utopia in 1516 from the Greek ou-topos, meaning ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’ and the almost identical eu-topos, meaning ‘good place.’ After the earliest incarnation of a utopia in Plato’s Republic, More asks a more direct question about this philosophical concept by ascribing a double meaning to his imagined society: can a perfect place ever exist in the real world?2 More’s Utopia is constructed around a paradox: while it is clearly a critique on the society More himself lived in, it is also unmistakably a fictional place. It is this paradox that is inherent to the project that Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005) dedicated almost twenty years of his life to: New Babylon. While New Babylon is just one of the many utopias –and not to forget dystopias- that were envisioned after More’s key publication, there is something that cannot quite be grasped about New Babylon that has made it stand out, and still makes it stand out today. It does not come as a surprise then, that the venerable subject of utopia in general, and New Babylon in specific, has gotten its fair share of attention.3 Around the turn of the twentieth century, when society was rapidly changing as a result of globalisation and the rise of the Internet, a renewed interest emerged within contemporary art among artists, curators, art fairs and museums to yet again turn towards utopian future visions as a source of inspiration and exploration. This, as Martin van Schaik calls it, “utopian frenzy” that took place at the end of the previous millennium, came with a flood of books, essays and exhibitions about utopias and ideal 1 Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000(1918)), 1. 2 George Sanderlin, “The Meaning of Thomas More’s “Utopia””, College English 12:2 (1950): 74-77. 3 For different philosophical understandings of utopias see for example publications by Ernst Bloch, Theodor W. Adorno, Jurgen Moltmann and Max Horkheimer. Hinten 7 worlds within the intellectual and artistic market.4 Even the rise of the latest format of artistic display, the biennial, can in itself be seen as an embodiment of a utopia. As Hans Ulrich Obrist argues “biennials are both places and non-places”. 5 It seems like we, as citizens of the world, are more than ever referring back to this ancient search for happiness, freedom and paradise. As Theodor Adorno puts it, we are desperately looking for “a fantasy of an exotic vacation from insistent, plaguing social problems; Utopia has become a deserted island of cliché. 6 In result, the largest part of publications on the topic tends to focus on the architectural aspects or moral merit of utopian projects. Given the formally inspirational effect the project has had on well known architects, such as Aldo van Eyck and Superstudio, and more recently Rem Koolhaas and RAAAF,7 New Babylon has not only been celebrated as the perfect example of such an utopia, it has also been presented as a project that could actually be realized.8 The publication of an extensive study on New Babylon by architect and theorist Mark Wigley “Constant’s New Babylon: They Hyper-Architecture of Desire” in 1998 and the related exhibition held at the Witte de With Center for contemporary art in Rotterdam, played an important role in once again putting New Babylon in the spotlights of the international art world from an architectural point of view.
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