Infrastructures on the Line: London, Tel Aviv and Ramallah
 
[Excerpts from a conversation between Francis Mckee, Tom Morton and students*] 
 
[…]
 
Nir: I think we’ve all enjoyed the meetings this week, as well as the lectures. We wanted to ask about your experience here. We know that it’s your first visit, Tom, and Francis, you came from Ramallah; and it sounds like a complex experience. We wanted to hear a bit about being here and being in both places.  
 
Tom: It's been very friendly, and the students’ work has been of a really high standard. Bezalel is a very good place. It's nice that that's confirmed! I wasn't expecting your focus to be on just one thing, of course, because that’s not the way the world or art function right now, but it was so multiple, and so surprising in so many different ways. There's a real working out of people's projects, a real difference in how complete the second year have tended to be as artists in comparison to the first year. Something important seems to be happening in-between those two states. These may be really bland observations, but they’re my genuine impression.
 
Francis: I agree with that. Because, in first year so many people look lost and then suddenly it comes together for them; and it comes from so many different directions. This seems to happen year after year. This year there are some students coming from post production, very high end cinema. I don't know if there was anything like that before, but there are always people coming from different media. The program seems to pick up people from different areas and stick them all together. And at the end you'll come out as one unit.  
 
Yael: Can you tell us a bit about Ramallah?
 
Francis: I was there on a visit with theater people, IETM, European theater venues... it seemed like a good idea to attach myself to that visit. They were there to see if they could find out what was there in terms of infrastructure. And then to think about collaborating with that infrastructure; what could be done? What do people want to do? It was interesting.
 
   There was a video conference with artists in Gaza. They did the conference as much for people in Ramallah as for us, because we couldn't say very much and the Gazans didn't understand much about our visit. We were peripheral in some ways to that event, and it was quite an emotional encounter in so many ways for those from the West Bank and Gaza.
 
   Overall, the Palestinians were just figuring out what... why would people want to collaborate with us? Would they want to? And really, it was just about getting work to be seen. It was no different, in a sense, from any artist in any country. People want their work to be seen, it's just much more difficult doing that in the West Bank. There is much less infrastructure there. So there are Hip Hop bands who were saying: well, we want to play and are very successful, but we have to hire microphones and hire every piece of equipment. There is just no equipment. There are buildings for theatres, but there's no theater. There's no cinema. So other buildings are converted into cinemas. There's a cinema industry but there's no technical support. There's no one to teach them how to do sound, lighting, set designs. There's a lack of infrastructure in every possible way. And there's a real urgency to them with what they are trying to do.
 
There's an urgent debate going on about why you engage with culture. One half of the debate states that culture is a weapon - there's no room for ambiguity; what is produced must be about the situation and must address the situation. And then there are others saying: actually, if you want to create a culture, to help build the country, then we need to be more ambiguous; we need to be more sophisticated. We need work that isn't about culture as a weapon, work that addresses other issues or questions Palestinians, Israelis, everyone and everything, rather than making grand statements. So there's a big debate and no consensus, necessarily, wholly within the country. I think a lot of people are worried about that definition of culture as a weapon. In that they can see why people say it, but they worry that's not enough. So, that's quite an important debate at the moment.
 
    It's hard to summarize my feelings about what I saw there, there are so many levels to consider, from looking at everyday
life, shops, how people live, to looking at the art world. You are taking in those multiple levels. There are all sorts of degrees of sophistication. In some ways Ramallah is much more cosmopolitan than Tel Aviv. Oddly, there are more people passing through it. One student I was talking to in the art school pointed out that you got a better art education by staying there than going away to school in Europe. There is a constant stream of people going there to teach, so there is a cosmopolitan, outward looking art education, from necessity. Tel Aviv, however, as many people have pointed out, is like a bubble. The city is not as aware of what's around it sometimes, even within Israel itself. So there's a peculiar kind of difference there. It's just fascinating to see.
 
   There's much more money in Tel Aviv, obviously, and much more infrastructure and much more everything. But then, there's also a sense of complete isolation here, people wondering how they can get their works out of Israel to other places, for different reasons than the Palestinians.
 
   I don't know if I answered the question. It’s a tough question with many different answers. 
 
Nir: So it's affected the way you see Tel Aviv?
 
Francis: This time more than previous times. There's much more of an infrastructure of occupation now. It's all about infrastructure. You see it all across the West Bank. Settlements that are increasingly joining up to each other. The tentacles are spreading. It used to be a little bit here, a little bit there. And now you just see it everywhere. And you think well, how can this ever stop or stabilize...what's going to happen with this? It's not going to go away. I think there is an increasing sense that for Palestinians it's not going to go away. And so, how are these two worlds going to live side-by-side? At this point there's almost no differentiation, territorially, and that... you wonder, what's going to happen... so it does affect me coming here.
 
I was just shocked by simple things - the different quality of the road surfaces between areas serving settlements and in areas serving Palestinian towns. You go from something that's incredibly fragile, that has got nothing to support it, and then you come to Tel Aviv...and you see trains, a new line. There was no line when I came here first, but now you can see it snaking through the landscape surrounded by more high rises, more buildings, more shops, etc. The disparities are increasing. You can't help but being shocked when you see it. It's depressing to see the gulf widen between the two worlds.  
 
Ilit: You've visited Bil'in this time or in before?
 
Francis: Before, a while ago. Bil'in looks like a field. It's got some beehives and it's got little huts. It's where people go to protest, you know more about it than I do.
 
Nir: Yes, it's a village, ten minutes from Ramallah. They've been struggling against the occupation and the separation wall for the last five years. Israel has built a wall and confiscated about a two thirds of their agricultural lands. On these lands they have built a new neighborhood that extends the nearby settlement. The people of Bil'in are a major force in the Palestinian non violent struggle. Now it seems that Israel is starting to change the route of the wall about two years after the Israeli high court has decreed that the route of the wall was not made for security reasons, that lands have been taken illegally. While they might start measuring a different route of the wall, today, after a few months and many night invasions and arrests, about 15 people from Bil'in have been arrested. Some of them for an unknown measure of time, including members of the popular committee, the struggle leaders. 
 
Nir: Francis, you have talked about the issue of centralized culture, and yesterday in the talk you have presented an ongoing project that deals with agriculture. Since it just came up again in this idea of infrastructure and its connection to culture, I wanted to ask you both what do you think about these alternative methods of art-making? It seems again that there's a strong infrastructure here. But its connection to the artists themselves is quite weak. Most of the time, it's hard to get support from the government.
 
Ilit: Impossible.
 
Nir: It's next to impossible. And I think that in Britain, for example, or at least in the 90's, there was a lot of money.
 
Tom: I think that that's perhaps the view from fairly far away. The idea that lots of governmental money goes to artists in Britain is probably mistaken. There's certainly an amount of money that is put into cultural institutions, but in recent years that’s been largely in the service of, or supposedly in the service of, audiences. So it's for things like educational programs, new buildings to attract a mass public and so on. My particular take on a lot of this is that it was an effort by a leftist (or supposedly leftist) government to use culture as a kind of social emollient. In a poor neighborhood, it’s really expensive to create jobs and improve infrastructure, but it's comparatively very cheap to put some money into a contemporary art center that's brightly colored, with a determinedly populist program. These places are kind of like clowns – supposedly loveable but actually pretty creepy. "Vibrant" is the word that is used again and again and again in British cultural policy. It's horrible. Vibrant doesn't mean art or arts programming has an intellectual content. Vibrant doesn't mean it has a political content.
 
I worry that British culture is heading towards everything looking like the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games… I think that’s what the government prefers. Most people like fireworks and like bright colors, so arts centers that program along these lines can claim to be democratic, without ever asking you to think difficult thoughts.
 
Yael: I don't know if it’s just a British thing…
 
Tom: Of course, if this works for one government it’s likely to work for another government. It simply replicates. I think lots of administrations are interested in culture as pretty much mindless celebration. They assume the public are idiotic, and that filters down to art institutions and then on to students who are in danger of believing in that themselves. There is not so much real resistance, I feel, from most art institutions.
 
Francis: The point you were talking about earlier, the way the city works… the city will invest if you do something that will bring tourists.  They count the number of beds we are filling. Someone will come to a hotel and spend 10 pounds every day in shops while visiting to see art. And that’s how the city measures it and then decides the level of funding. … [In Glasgow] It's often about tourism and branding. That’s our industry now, we don't have shipbuilding anymore. So art and culture get branded and you have to wonder if it’s worthwhile; you have to keep aware of this process… maybe Hakim Bey is our best model with his idea of a contemporary autonomous zone that springs up and exists temporarily.
 
Tom: In lots of cultural institutions there is a kind of deskilling going on. People who have a deep knowledge of art and have a relationship with the artistic community are being replaced by cultural managers that are more used to working on temporary expos, civic celebrations, education programs - things like that. It’s kind of odd that the museum show or museum display - of all things - is often positioned as being totalitarian.
 
I think the expo is a lot more insidious, and a lot more connected to contemporary capitalism, and to the way contemporary labor circulates…it's scary. An evolutionary leap I’ve noticed in the last few years is towards extremely well funded exhibition spaces which don’t show art, exactly, or even historical material, but rather images and objects that attempt to address a mass audience that’s assumed to have no interest in (and no interest in learning about) things they are not already familiar with.
 
I wrote a short play a little while ago for a magazine called TANK, which was a transcript of a conference held in 2018, nine years into the future, at the London ICA… within this I imagined that at some point there would emerge cultural centers without art or curators. You’d just have facilitators, technicians of the soul. Visitors could come and tell these technicians what they would like to see in the cultural centre, and this could be made to their specifications and exhibited. In my darker moments, I wonder whether this is the art of the future…
 
Francis: Politicians don’t want to spend money on culture at all; it seems frivolous compared to jobs and health, for instance. They want to find useful things to spend money on, so they want art to appear educational or socially useful or they want blockbuster success each time, like the current exhibition at Tel Aviv museum. But not all art can achieve that and that is a healthy thing. Above all, for us, we have to keep asking why are people making art in the first place? Why do artists make art? rather than what social function can it serve or how can it justify public funding?
 
Francis: It is a dangerous time, but interesting as well.
 
Elad: But I think it's evolution… for example, terror is now replacing war between countries. Today there is no country - there is terror. I think it's parallel to what is happening with art today. Maybe some kind of process had finalized, and now there is a new way to approach it. Maybe it's like a guerilla style of sorts. In some ways the world is now one, and countries can't go to war. They closed that corner.
 
Dana: Now it's all outsourced.
 
Tom: And now nations even outsource their wars to private companies.
 
Francis: China wants to go to war now, because of Facebook.
 
Tom: It's interesting that you mention guerilla tactics. There is something nostalgic about that…what is cultural terror? You end up becoming like the protagonist of Fight Club. I mean, if it's Banksy, then fuck that.
 
Elad: Exactly.
 
Tom: That's not guerrilla in any sense, that's entirely product…there are a few Banksys near my place in London, and the local government put up Perspex over this graffiti to keep it from being defaced.
 
[…]
 
Francis : It's good in one respect that you have in all these paintings, you have to defend the right or the reason why you are doing it. There was no need five years ago in whatever art fairs, or whatever biennales. I was almost thinking: everyone does it, everyone can do it and get bigger and bigger. And now you have to think, well, why bother? Why do it? How does it work? Can it work the same way? It's slightly depressing. 
 
Tom:  Do you guys feel that when curators come to Israel that they’re interested in looking at your work for a particular reason that's to do with geo-politics? I was wondering how you feel about that?
 
Dana: There's always that sense of…someone goes into your studio and starts to place things; it's always like that, even if it's just a friend.
 
Ilit: What do you mean "to place things"?
 
Dana: They try to think: Where do you come from? Why do you do this? What does it look like? Where have I seen something like this? Is it exactly the same? Why is it new? All kinds of questions we ask in front of art, and I think people expect very bad things and are usually surprised. This is my experience, this is how I feel.
 
Yael: Yeah, I agree that in general they try to place you. But I think that when people from the outside come here, to this charged area, we are being looked at through that.
 
Tom: No act of observation is neutral, so if someone comes in hoping to read the history of the nation from an artist's work, he would probably do that.
 
Dana: There is something a bit colonial about the way they look.
 
Nir: I think there is certain stickiness to the term "Israeli". When you go abroad and even when you are here. There is always the attempt to define Israeli art. You can't set the political apart. I think it's still different in a place like Bezalel, when the visitor knows he's meeting a student.  
 
Tom: There are two things. One of course is a curiosity which is fairly un-inflected. But then there is a school of curating which is: ok, let’s go somewhere where there is a politically sexy conflict, find an artist, take him or her home, then show the work as though it were a window onto that conflict, without paying any attention to the artist’s particular concerns – the smears on the panes, the cracks in the glass. I fantasize about the moment when Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea finally crumbles, which it will. The influx of curators who'll go there will be so great…  
 
Francis: I'm sure some of them have been there already.
 
Elad: It's a gold rush.
 
Francis: There's an invisible line, as you say, Glasgow, London, France, Germany, USA, are all within this line. And then there is boundary beyond that, where if you are Eastern European, or you're Israeli, or if you are South American, or you are from somewhere like Lithuania, then you also wonder what kind of work curators are looking for. I was contacted by an African artist who wanted someone to speak at his show about why is it ok for European or American to appropriate African Art. But if an African appropriated American or European art, you'd be seen as imitating. There is a difference there.
 
Tom: But isn’t it rather more culturally problematic nowadays for artists to appropriate African Art than it was in the days of early Cubism? I don't think there is much in a way of rewards for doing so now…
 
Francis: There are also China and India, where you could say that the European /American model is becoming redundant …why would China need to be validated by Britain now - what's the point? So, in that new scenario, Saatchi becomes redundant, with his Chinese show. China doesn't need Europe or America, neither does India. That moment of trying to be recognized by Saatchi has passed for them.  
[…]
 
Tom: I guess behind that is the question of what you want and why... What do you guys want from your work, or for it? There are questions that are internal to the work, and there are questions that are external. Do you want to be at Documenta, Do you want to sell?
 
Elad: Politics of culture follow the real politics, so you have to be aware of this. And here it's a bigger problem because it's a special place; it's not your regular place. The culture doesn't actually have any roots. It's very artificial in some ways. I think a lot of artists here hope for international success, local versions of international success … it's a very insecure place on the cultural level; It's a colony in some ways. It's really hard to find really genuine stuff here, and if we look for the authentic, what are we looking for, the Arabs or the West? It's confusing. We don't know which place to look at. I'm looking at the Arabs when I think about authenticity, not at the West. But I use Western tools, so it's a bit of a mind fuck… in China they have roots, we don't have roots.
 
Elham: It's not exotic enough, on the one hand, because Israeli artists choose not to make local art, like you might say about a Chinese artist, or an Iranian artist. On the other hand, it's not exactly Western art. It's too far and not exotic enough for the west, so, again, we fall in-between.
 
[…]
 
Francis: It tells us a lot about the way in which people decide which are the influential art countries. It's always the strength of their economy, economic portfolios… it's hard to be authentic if you have a mobile phone and you live in the middle of Ramallah or the middle of Tehran. What kind of roots really are there? the notion of pure cultural roots becomes increasingly unstable in the electronic world that blends cultures and influences around us. 
 
Nir:  It has some relation to the MFA, which focuses on the notion of career. Because when you ask, "what do you want to achieve?" Is it a question of career or a product? What do you want to be?
 
Francis: It depends how you read the question.
 
Nir: I, for one, want to manage to build something. I'm thinking of new constructs. It's hard for me to figure out the missing link. Yet, I probably want to build them here. I think they belong here in someway.
 
Francis: Art education everywhere is very much about career now. You can do a Ph.D. and get your transferable skills, you can become a teacher or a professor and you can have a career. Earlier, people didn't necessarily think of art as a career. Like early rock n' roll. People didn't think, "I'll be doing this when I'm sixty".  They thought, "we'll all be dead by the time we are twenty five".
 
Tom: In England we have this idea of the professions: law and medicine and accountancy. To be a professional is to have made a genuine deal with mainstream society, benign or not. There is a lot of talk about being a ‘professional’ artist, but I can’t see how that works. It’s an agreement. Should artists agree?
 
Yael: It's a tricky definition.
 
Francis: Jimmie Durham is a really good example – making artwork and then returning to activism… and then he drops out entirely as an artist. But it doesn't feel like it's a career choice. He's not on the career path thinking, "what decision do I need to make to take me to the next professional level?". He makes art because he wants to make art, then he stops. Seems like a different kind of rhythm to making things. So why should you do it at fifty when you do it at twenty five? Who says the art career has to be a career like an accountant or a lawyer. It can be different. You can make one piece and stop - must be someone who's done it. Duchamp dropped out for quite a long time.
 
Tom:  It makes me kind of nostalgic for something that seems really uncool - the classic early Picasso / Braque model of: "fuck it, let’s move to Paris and let's be really, really poor". And that seems something that has comes from nowhere to suddenly having some traction again now… For a few years now, especially in America, young artists have attempted this post-Koonsian thing in which they cleave utterly to the market, while attempting to pass it off as a sophisticated joke about the market. It’s not interesting irony, though. They’re just being dickheads.  
 
Francis: It has traction because it avoids all the methods that you have to gain traction. From mobile phones to Facebook. You can connect yourself so well, it's hard to disconnect yourself. I like to disconnect.
 
*** 
 
* Tom Morton is a London-based curator and writer. He is currently a curator at the Hayward Gallery, London, and contributing editor at Frieze magazine.   
 
Francis McKee is an Irish writer and curator working in Glasgow. He is a lecturer and research fellow at Glasgow School of Art, working on the development of open source ideologies. 
www.francismckee.com