Actors, Agents and Attendants I: Artist Positions

The projects by national and international artists are circulated through the city, the Internet or presented in a temporary setting.

The artists have developed new projects, which critically reflect on the current debate on health care, resulting from an increasing trend for public services to adopt neo-liberal market practices within the public policies. Artist Positions will take the role of activating the public’s awareness in questioning relevant issues unfolded during the symposium.

Laser 3.14

(NO TITLE YET), 2010
Graffiti intervention in the city
Laser 3.14 is the pseudonym of an anonymous graffiti artist active in Amsterdam. The poet behind the pseudonym Laser 3.14 has been leaving personal and often lyrical and politically tinged messages on temporary buildings and fences for the past few years. His sentences respond to current social issues, such as the role of religion or the collapse of the stock market, but also raise more existential questions. The messages provide the passer-by with food for thought and in some situations also offer a different view of the surroundings. For Artist Positions, Laser 3.14 has developed a series of sentences in relation to the subject of public health care and will be visible temporarily in major circulation points of the city of Amsterdam providing a critical insight to the issue and stimulating passers by his witty and ironic texts.

Bik van der Pol

(NO TITLE YET), 2010
Photograph

Using the motif of the ‘point d’ironie’, artists Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol will be working together with the participants of two invited expert meetings and one public moment. They will produce a performative photograph in the Amsterdamse Bos which was a huge public project developed as an emergency plan to facilitate labour during the years of crisis in 1934. The project is based loosely to the similar action by the Slovak artist Julius Koller’s Univerzálny Futurologicky Otáznik Futurological Question Mark (UFO) in 1978, forming a question mark with a group of people. The point d’ironie is a mirrored question mark which was invented by the poet Alcanter de Brahm in the end of 19th century, and was used to indicate irony and sarcasm.

The punctuation mark embodies BikvanderPol’s questions as commissioned artists in relation to what their contribution may be. Their contribution and role within the context of care and politics may be uncertain: it is an adventure with unknown outcomes. This impossibility of knowing is however marked by one certainty: all the participants in these meetings will ‘co-produce’ and communicate ideas and speculations on where we are heading to. They decide to punctuate importance of all those involved in these discussions and of the moment. The final outcome will be distributed as postcards to be obtained by the public.

Marc Bijl

(NO TITLE YET), 2010
Poster intervention

The Dutch artist Marc Bijl has designed a poster with a quote by 18th century Dutch psychiatrist and philosopher Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733): “Trots en ijdelheid hebben meer ziekenhuizen gebouwd dan alle deugden bij elkaar” (Dutch for “Pride and greed have built more hospitals than all the virtues together”) to be posted around the city of Amsterdam and its hospitals. Censored and prosecuted during his time, Mandeville has published The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits in 1741, which has only been recently translated into Dutch. Mandeville’s book elucidates many key principles of economic thought as he was convinced that human societies are based on the shared need for protection even though people are selfish in essence, and guided by personal interests. He concluded that individual benefit does not necessarily match the socially useful and desirable. Rather, he believed that it was vicious greed which could lead to services for the public good if properly channeled.
This concept is now known as the Mandeville paradox. Bijl’s use of this timely quote is not only a provocative reaction towards the progressively privatized health care sector in the current crisis of the welfare state, but also questions an individual’s interest in creating a public good.

Pilvi Takala

Untitled, 2010
Video

This video is a collection of the visits Takala has made with NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) trainers in an attempt to be cured of her fear of swine flu or the impending flu epidemic.
The project draws direct reference to the various governments’ precautionary measures of stockpiling vaccines against the swine flu outbreak last year. The scenario was deemed useless as people refused to take the vaccines based on unclear side effects and the harmlessness of the epidemic. In taking a position of a hypochondriac, Takala investigates the mechanisms in play in the formation of individual and collective psychological responses as public institutions and medical professionals fail to ensure protection for its citizens. This paranoia founded upon the distrust to medical professions becomes a prompt to seek for alternative ways to safe guard one’s health outside the formal structures of scientific medicine.
The film will be screened during the symposium.

Elmgreen & Dragset

Opname, 2010
Installation

Elmgreen & Dragset have been working in the past decades in challenging our understanding of social and institutional spaces. The artists create objects, architectural interventions and installations serving to deconstruct these notions and provide space for new interpretations. The site-specific installation It’s the small things that matter, blah blah blah is presented in the Inkijk with a new title, Opname (Dutch for waiting room) and was originally produced and displayed during The Welfare Show in 2005-2006.* The restaged installation in De Inkijk revisits the issues linked to the supposedly liberal and socially responsible political system that is currently under pressure by forces of neoliberal politics and globalisation.

Modeled after a nondescript waiting room in the hospital and consisting of a generic plant, a waiting bench, a ticket dispenser and a blinking sign with ‘000’, Opname presents the dehumanized reality of socialized care. It also subtly stages the amount of time we spend waiting to be processed through various public offices. The gallery space is being transformed into an austere and governed institutional space which characterizes our day to day encounter with welfare services. Rather than a didactic overview of state support, Opname offers the audience a space to rethink how the welfare provision is being administered and today’s decline of shared societal values.

*The seminal traveling exhibition The Welfare Show was initiated by the Bergen Kunsthall in 2005 and produced in collaboration with Bawag Foundation, Vienna; The Power Plant, Toronto and Serpentine Gallery, London. The work Opname was first shown at The Welfare Show at Serpentine gallery, London 2006

Martijn Engelbregt

The project that Martijn Engelbregt is developing within the frame of this symposium will experience its first stages in private. In a later stage, the outcome of his project will be presented and published by SKOR.

Actors, Agents and Attendants is a series of symposia initiated by SKOR | Foundation for Art and Public Domain