VOTI UNION OF THE IMAGINARY SALT008-VOTI-001 VOTI UNION OF THE IMAGINARY VOTI Union of the Imaginary A Curators Forum Edited by Susan Hapgood, Vasıf Kortun and November Paynter Published online by SALT, Istanbul, 2013 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License SALT008-VOTI-02 VOTI UNION OF THE IMAGINARY Postcard sent from Hans Ulrich Obrist to Susan Hapgood, 1998 SALT008-VOTI-03 VOTI UNION OF THE IMAGINARY Contents Introduction 5 Appendix 443 VOTI Timeline 9 TNCS Networkers - Civil Society - Transnational Members of VOTI, 1998 - 2000 12 Corporations - Democratic Governance, Brian Holmes 444 Vita VOTI 13 In Conversation 17 The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, Seth Siegelaub and Robert Projansky 453 Research document: The Trial of Pol Pot 463 Of Course, Intensity and Art Can Change the World. VOTI FORUM 37 Harald Szeemann and Rosa Martínez 466 Chapter I The Museum of the XXI Century 48 Chapter II The Economy of the Art World 101 Chapter III The Whitney Letter and FRACS 140 Biographies 487 Chapter IV The Trial of Pol Pot 211 Thanks and Acknowledgements 497 Chapter V Frieze and Artforum 245 Endnotes 498 Chapter VI Cultural Practice and War 261 Chapter VII Sensation 409 Chapter VIII ARCO 2000 420 SALT008-VOTI-04 VOTI UNION OF THE IMAGINARY Introduction Susan Hapgood and Vasıf Kortun For only a few years, just before the turn of the millenium, VOTI (Union of the Imaginary) flourished. It was an international forum that existed online, a digital place for discussion among contemporary art curators, many of whom are among today’s most prominent museum professionals. Because members were writing from all over the world, geographic and cultural distances were oftentimes palpable, while at other moments invisible, as we met at this common digital forum. There were days and nights when discussions careened uncontrollably away from the original topic on the table, but for most members it was liberating to read what kindred spirits (or adversaries) were thinking and doing elsewhere, to hear their voices without any institutional or editorial framing and without any mediated filter. E-mail etiquette did not yet exist, so VOTI postings were unstructured, freewheeling, antagonistic, fleeting, exhilarating, ultimately amorphous and at times incoherent. Despite attempts to structure the forum with set conversations, the bigger picture was organic. It was above all a union where discussions were tough and uncensored. The internationalism of the group was unusual, the instantaneity was novel. It gave us all a taste of the digital future. By this point, the “brand” status of curators had already been consolidated earlier in the 1990s by our predecessors. The chief curator of painting and sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art, Kirk Varnedoe, by 1998 had already posed for a full-page ad for New York department store Barney’s. Kaspar König, Rudi Fuchs and Jean-Christophe Ammann were invited to the Whitney Museum of American Art for the museum’s Views from Abroad series in the late 1990s. Following Jan Hoet’s celebrated 1988 Chambres d’amis (MuKHA, Antwerp) project of artists’ installations set in Ghent’s private residences, Mary Jane Jacob’s 1991 exhibition, Places with a Past, introduced a series of site-specific public projects rooted in the sociopolitical histories of Charleston, South Carolina, working entirely outside the museum and gallery system. In terms of mega-exhibitions, Harald Szeemann returned to the Venice Biennale in 1999, this time to extend the presentation to the Corderie and Artiglierie in the Arsenale, radically expanding the scope of the biennale. In short, by the time of VOTI’s formation SALT008-VOTI-05 VOTI UNION OF THE IMAGINARY in 1998, the curatorial subject was already quite recognizable, the early curatorial-studies education programs were more than half a decade old, and yet the profession was not yet quite as fetishized as it has become today. Most importantly, the affairs between exhibiting institutions and guest curators were extremely problematic. Institutional mistreatment was not the only reason for the founding of VOTI but it was a thread running through many of the discussions. E-mail E-mail was still fairly new. It was commercially introduced in 1988, and by the 1990s many younger people were active on the Internet. These kinds of online discussion groups were novel structures. Not conducive to senior professionals, who were neither mentally nor technologically prepared to engage in generous, laterally motivated discussions, these networked groups produced their own constellations, their own new communities. Older generations who were not familiar or comfortable with the e-mail format were excluded. Concurrently, e-mail was rapidly becoming essential to many curators living and working outside of major urban cultural centers. It was the sole means of keeping up with contemporaneity, short of travel, which was affordable to some but not all VOTI members. Structure There was an attempted structure, with Carlos Basualdo, Jordan Crandall, Susan Hapgood and Hans Ulrich Obrist, trying to run the group as lighthandedly as possible, all as volunteers. New members were suggested and invited to join the forum, and VOTI grew from a handful of interested colleagues to a much larger community of people who did not necessarily know one another at all. Selected discussion sessions were open (to anyone who was interested) or closed (readable only by VOTI members), depending upon the topic. As VOTI developed, moderators for particular discussions attempted to sustain, guide, and inspire the discussions, sometimes with great success, and other times with little response. The whole forum was run for free on the server of The Thing, artist Wolfgang Staehle’s online social network, which was launched in 1991 and geographically located at offices in Chelsea neighborhood of New York at the time. In these years, the Internet was not yet overwhelmed by private interest and a spirit of openness prevailed. SALT008-VOTI-06 VOTI UNION OF THE IMAGINARY Organization of the Contents Whereas readers of this publication are being spoon-fed discussions composed around clear topics, VOTI members had to try to keep up with various simultaneous threads of conversation. When they were first written, these posts appeared in real time as they were sent; nobody was mediating the message order or screening them for content. At times it was extremely chaotic to read all of what was streaming onto our screens, to decide when to jump into the fray or remain silent. A little more than a decade later a number of VOTI contributors remarked on their interest to revisit what many of them remembered as a formative series of discussions. With this impetus we began to work from files disinterred from old servers, and e-mails searched out from aged computer memories, but ironically the bulk of the material in this e-publication was sourced from a stack of e-mail print-outs retrieved from a summer home. Rather than try to replicate the original forum experience, or the salvaged archives, our co-editor November Paynter suggested that the material should be slightly sifted and organized, to order the discussions around particularly evident topics of discussion—some that were officially predetermined, and some of which emerged on their own. A brief introduction she has written at the beginning of each chapter provides a precise condensation of what will be found within. The dates of the different chapters’ posts sometimes overlap, and in fact this new organization makes the discussions far more coherent than they initially were. Less than five percent of the material available to us was edited out of this e-publication and for those that were, the reasoning was simple: either a post’s topic was random and could not be placed in a thread, the e-mail was personal, or layers of formatting from an e-mail having passed through various servers had left the text incomprehensible. The only exception to this rule is for the chapter on Cultural Practice and War. This discussion included numerous posts sharing copy-pasted news items and media coverage of the Kosovo War (1998-1999), which were mostly edited out to maintain a rhythm of VOTI member postings. Regardless, all of this material is still available in the VOTI archives. SALT008-VOTI-07 VOTI UNION OF THE IMAGINARY Other editorial decisions have been made to facilitate easier reading in the e-book format. To avoid endless repetition while risking the loss of authenticity, the longer headings and footings that appeared on each original posting have been deleted. Part of the original VOTI footnote stipulated that all e-mail content was considered the property of individual authors and so SALT sought each contributor’s permission to include their copy in this e-publication. In only a handful of cases permission was not forthcoming. Throughout the posts, new links have been embedded, citations added for people and events, and editorial notes inserted when e-mails could not be found or seem to be missing. Texts and other material that was posted in the forum, but which are too long to include in the chain of e-mailmails, are included in the appendix. A timeline for VOTI has also been drawn up. Achievements VOTI established solidarity among a core group of curators because it offered an opportunity to strategize professional agency in the face of institutional demands, and to communicate in a closed forum about very real long-term and immediate challenges. Some of these postings are brief and concise, some are longwinded exegeses. The professional exchange of information, about what it was to be a contemporary art curator at that time, about the inextricable relationship to the world economy, the problems of cultural translation, the communal outrage over museum directors and regional governments blithely trampling over curatorial rights—these were just some of the topics covered in VOTI’s voluminous outpourings.