Contents OPEN 8 (In)visibility

OPEN 8 Beyond the image in art, culture and the public domain.

The degree of visibility of social, political, economic and cultural events through public images is regarded as an indicator of the level of democracy in a society. Visibility is associated with openness and communication, with social order and political stability. The invisible represents not only the uncontrolled, impossible or suppressed but also that which is waiting to be disclosed. Within this regime the visual media continuously produces images while the ‘audience’ is also constantly engaged in visualizing its own experiences. In this intoxicating process every message of a social agenda seems to disappear. So what position does art have in this? What can be the commitment of the artist, designer or architect and his or her involvement and legitimacy? And which specific developments in contemporary visual culture play a role in this? On this issue the regular editorial staff worked together with guest editors, Willem van Weelden en Jan van Grunsven.

Overview OPEN

Jorinde Seijdel
Editorial
Online article

Willem van Weelden
Viewing : Seeing : Looking Away
Online article

Camiel van Winkel
The Regime of Visibility

Using a number of examples from fashion, advertising, graphic design and television, Camiel van Winkel investigates the regime of visibility and its implications for a critical approach to contemporary visual culture. This article is an extract from his forthcoming book The Regime of Visibility, which will be published in autumn 2005 by NAi Uitgevers, Rotterdam.

Photographic essay by Pascale Gatzen

For Open 8, the editors invited Pascale Gatzen to make a visual contribution, more specifically in reaction to The Regime of Visibility by Camiel van Winkel. As a fashion designer, Pascale Gatzen is primarily interested in fashion as a formal system of codification and production of meaning.
Gatzen won international fame with photos of clothing she made herself, which were published in various fashion magazines. Her clothes are meticulous re-creations of the two-dimensional images of clothing as presented in fashion spreads in magazines such as Purple, i-D magazine and Vogue, but rather than interpreting the items of clothing from the fashion spreads (the collaborative interpretation of designer, stylist and photographer) as derivatives of an original, as representation, Gatzen treats them as something that can be treated as inspiration, as source. By photographing the remake and presenting it alongside the photo from the fashion collection on which it is based, Gatzen manages to liberate the image from the representation, or, put more precisely, opts to revise image and representation in a way that transcends their limitations.

Jouke Kleerebezem
The Post-Monumental Image
On Enduring Visibility in the Network Society

In the last several years, under the spotlight of media attention, a number of spontaneous monuments have popped up all over the place, monuments that threaten to ignore society’s complexity and remain visible only as long as the media’s attention lasts. This places the traditional monument, as well as the collective memory, in jeopardy. In Jouke Kleerebezem’s view, the networked media offer significant perspectives of a new process of ‘post-monumental conceptualization’, a new economy of attention.

Brian Holmes
Transparency & Exodus
On Political Process in the Mediated Democracies

The British cultur critic and activist Brian Holmes claims that the imprint of artistic experimentation on social protest movements is undeniable. He examines the notion of process as that which experimental art and activism have in common. Holmes analyses the exodus, mass defection, as a means of escaping the immobilizing transparency of the mediated democracies, as a way to resist politics-as-usual.
Online article

Jorinde Seijdel
Wild images
The Rise of Amateur Images in the Public Domain

There is nothing new in camera images shot by amateurs being able to play a role as evidence and as a visual resource in the reporting and interpretation of significant events – witness the Zapruder film of the assassination of J.F. Kennedy or the Rodney King video tape. Now, however, digital media and the Internet seem to make an increasing intrusion of amateur images in the professional media inevitable. What is the status of these ‘wild’ images in the public domain? Do they reveal the new blind spots of the official news media? Or do they primarily demonstrate a public desire for images that almost eradicate the distance from events?
Online article

Dieter Lesage
Empire and Design

When the political discourse retreates to the realm of the visual, when we are supposed to debate the appearance of a flag, then we have to admit that politics has become little more than visual design, according to the Belgian philosopher Dieter Lesage. He argues for a ‘fundamentalism of human rights’ that will guide us out of the post-political impasse of Empire, the world-embracing network characterized by Negri and Hardt.

Wouter Davidts
Column: The Museum Dismantled and Exposed
Online article

Willem van Weelden
'Nothing will come of nothing'
Territorial investigations by the Bureau d'Études

The Parisian, conceptual group Bureau d' Études is, for a considerable time already, in the course of literally mapping contemporary capitalism. Since the erosion of the Iron Curtain that organisational form has become a global affair.
A conversation on a practice of contra-cartography, that lends visibility to available but often invisible information in order to potentialise society and at the same time to actualise a potential society.

Henk Oosterling
The Public Existence of Homo Informans
On Art in Times of Terror

The trademark activity of the Critical Art Ensemble is producing and distributing knowledge as a counter-expertise to the relatively opaque and one-sided information issued by governments and by commercial companies about their products. This artists’ collective makes use of the nomadic, virtual character of today’s information society. However, the hybrid practices they use in striving towards openness and visibility are not often understood let alone appreciated. For Steve Kurtz, a member of CAE, the consequences were disastrous. On 29 June 2004, he was charged with wire and mail fraud.

Jan van Grunsven and Willem van Weelden
Invisible Politics
The Practice of DRFTWD Office Associates

Arno van der Mark joined forces with Gilbert Koskamp in 1999 to form the practice ‘DRFTWD/Archi components services’, now known as ‘DRFTWD Office Associates’. Their design practice is marked by a strategic spatial approach in which the concept of neutrality plays an important part. The text below is based on an interview with Arno van der Mark which took place at DRFTWD’s Amsterdam office on 22 September 2004.

A Round-Table Discussion Chaired by Henk Oosterling
Views on Art Training for Art in Public Space

Publicity and public space have turned out to be urgent sociocultural and political issues in recent decades. Art is pre-eminently a domain that has a bearing on the public sphere. Yet the Netherlands has neither a politically committed practice of art in public space, nor a tradition in that area. This country also lacks an artistic training option that concentrates exclusively on the practice of art in public space and on the social commitment that goes along with it. Apparently no need is seen for such a course within higher art education; or perhaps there is an insufficiency of expertise for anticipating the changing, compelling contexts that affect today’s art practice.
The editors and the guest editors of Open 8 invited a number of ‘professionals’ to exchange some ideas on higher art education with regard to art in public space. The participants in the private round-table discussion, chaired by the philosopher Henk Oosting, were as follows: Jeanne van Heeswijk, artist working in public space; Henk Slager, head of the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design; Jouke Kleerebezem, artist and advising researcher at the artists’ workplace Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht; Jan van Grunsven, artist and former coordinator of the OK5/department of Art and Public Space department, ArtEz, Arnhem.