Contents OPEN 10 (In)tolerance

OPEN 10 (In)tolerance. Freedom of Expression in Art and Culture

No discourse seems more hollow at the present moment than that about tolerance and freedom of expression: in Western culture these concepts are scarcely capable any longer of generating meanings that apply and appeal to all of us. The codes, rules, agreements and symbols that determine our freedoms and rights within the public domain have ceased to function effectively. Leaving cynicism and nihilism behind, the politico-philosophical concept of the public sphere needs to be articulated anew. The desire for this is projected not just onto politics, but also onto art, architecture and the city. Open 10 brings together analyses, stances and proposals of theoreticians and artists.

Overview OPEN

Jorinde Seijdel
Editorial
Online article

Peter Sloterdijk
Citizens in a Vat of Dye
The Birth of Democracy from the Spirit of Disarmament

The editors of Open had a lecture translated that was delivered by philosopher Peter Sloterdijk during the conference ‘Atmospheres for Freedom. Towards an Ecology of Good Government’ in Venice in 2004. In this lecture, Sloterdijk addresses the premises of a democratic society and the importance therein of written and representational media.

Gijs van Oenen
Soured Tolerance
The Dutch are Losing Their Way

The trend towards ‘interpassive citizenship’ that legal philosopher Gijs van Oenen wrote about in Open 6, is leading to a radical change in the way we behave in the public domain.1 Because of this, tolerance is in danger of sliding into an ever wider two-way split between assertion and presence, in other words between citizens who emphatically demand their rights and citizens who avoid making a choice. An important task in the coming years will therefore be to halt this process and to look for alternatives.

Jeroen Boomgaard
Radical Autonomy
Art in the Era of Process Management

Now that art is being deployed more and more in public/private development processes, people expect it to have a clearly described effect. The artist’s autonomous position is seriously undermined by this requirement – which, in Jeroen Boomgaard’s view, is a bad thing. He argues the case for a radicalization of the autonomy of art. That alone will allow art to wrest itself free of processes where the law of the strongest holds sway, and so become truly effective.
Online article

Roemer van Toorn
Aesthetics as Form of Politics
Arets and Koolhaas Provide Architecture with New Impulses

Contemporary architecture is seldom political. Either it withdraws from reality because of its introverted body of ideas or it uncritically embraces reality in all its heterogeneity. According to the architecture critic Roemer van Toorn, Wiel Arets’ library and Rem Koolhaas’ Casa-da-Música prove that it is indeed possible to develop what he calls a ‘political aesthetics’.

Max Bruinsma
Revenge of the Symbols

With works like ‘the butt plug gnome’ – the nickname given by the public to Paul McCarthy’s controversial sculpture – art in public space touches a sensitive nerve. The symbolic meaning of this sculpture is misunderstood ‘on the street’. According to Max Bruinsma, symbols are only meaningful within their own codes. That artists are looking for ways to provoke has become unsatisfactory, because the question of social responsibility is left unanswered.

Jorinde Seijdel
Koolhaas & Google in China
On the Perversion of Censorship

Rem Koolhaas and Google are doing business in China – along with countless others, of course. But the new promised land is still a dictatorship in which the Communist Party exercises censorship on a large scale. Both Koolhaas and Google appear to be supporting and facilitating that censorship with their own particular projects. Censorship, it would seem, is no longer a categorical evil in the post-modern culture, but an integral force.

The Buggers
Column Position#14: The fire, the fire is falling!
Online article

Tom McCarthy
The Radical Other
A Conversation about Amsterdam 2.0

In the project Amsterdam 2.0, a political model is developed, in which the idea of democracy is once more given content and meaning. The key phrase here is ‘radical tolerance’: the co-existence of the absolutely sovereign and the radical other. British artist/writer Tom McCarthy interviews artist Paul Perry and architect Maurice Nio on the meaning and possible implications of this model.
Online article

Joke Hermes
Not a Comfortable Situation to Be In
How Politically Effective is the Work of Martijn Engelbregt?

Joke Hermes lectures on the formation of public opinion at the InHolland University. The editors of Open invited her to write about the political effectiveness of the work of Martijn Engelbregt (www.egbg.nl), an artist who systematically explores the functioning of democracy in his projects. Her conclusion is that popular culture achieves more than art in terms of influencing the free formation of public opinion. For the moment, Engelbregt’s work is reserved for political and cultural cognoscenti.

Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan
Open Letter: Call of the Wild

The board of Open asked Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan to contribute to this issue on tolerance and intolerance. In their work they make use of film, texts and exhibitions to explore the limits of the public domain and to investigate the relations between art and its context. They wrote an Open Letter to the art committee of Zwolle municipal council in response to a commission for an ‘observation’. In their letter they examine the hidden preconditions behind contemporary site-specific art practice and challenge the committee to tolerate their objections as a site-specific contribution to the debate.

Lex ter Braak
The New Freemasonry. Appeal for Symbols Creates False Expectations

Art critic Anna Tilroe and exhibition maker Rutger Wolfson’s appeal to art to furnish the Netherlands with new symbols is ill-considered and gratuitous. Not only is it, in Lex ter Braak’s view, indefensible to presume you can prescribe a direction for art in this day and age, but the form in which the appeal to create new symbols went out was equivocal. The debate and the exhibition took place within the exclusive circles of the art world, and the attempts to target the public domain lacked all impact.

With artistscontributions by Martijn Engelbregt, Ben Laloua/DidierPascal, Front and Back Cover, and Lonnie van Brummelen, The Formal Trajectory