The Potential of Failure
Manos Tsangaris and Anh-Linh Ngo in conversation with Stefan Kraus
What do art institutions need if they are to remain relevant in polarised times? Stefan Kraus, director of Kolumba, the art museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne, emphasises focus rather than eventisation, and mediation without any target group presets. His key tools are passion for the subject matter, attention to detail and the capacity to take criticism. A conversation on silence as a format, the potential of failure and the courage to take a stand.
Interview
Kolumba, the Cologne art museum, which you have headed since 2008, refers to itself as a “Museum of Reflection”. Is reflection a tool that facilitates a different way of viewing, understanding and mediating artworks and art?
The term “tool” can really only be used as a crutch here, because it’s certainly not the case that a single “tool” can “fix” the quandary of how to organise public engagement with the art. Starting in the early 1990s, under my predecessor Joachim Plotzek, we began to promote the idea of the “Museum of Reflection”. We were primarily interested in creating a space to show the social and thus political relevance of art as a subject of individual reflection – in contrast and complementary to information and communication. Art is a radically subjective statement, and we wanted to enhance the conditions for encountering it in a way that is just as radically subjective.
We are living in an era of non-stop commentary: every experience is immediately accompanied, explained and drowned out by a cacophony of words and images. You once said that art has the capacity to create meaning without words, to give information without words, to be experienced without words. The same applies to architecture. In the context of a museum, architecture itself becomes a key tool of aesthetic perception. How has Peter Zumthor’s architecture enabled, or constrained, your work at Kolumba, especially in a time when silence and immediacy have become increasingly rare?
I think it’s important to accept the fact that you can’t and shouldn’t do everything at every location. In that respect, every high-profile piece of architecture has its limitations. Kolumba is a large vessel that transforms everything you fill it with into something precious. The building itself resists the notion of rapid consumption. There is an unspoken recommendation to take your time, to immerse yourself in something. Peter Zumthor designed a building that we were involved in at the planning and implementation level, with the goal of developing solutions that do not simply meet our needs but go well beyond that. These spaces give added impact to each object that is exhibited in them. That’s why architecture requires precise curatorial decisions about what exhibitions and events are mounted, about what is staged and how it is presented. At the same time, architecture stimulates curiosity and a desire to experiment and work with new formats.
In your book Formate bestimmen die Inhalte (Formats Determine Content), you analyse how the art industry itself is shaped by its formats, and how it is increasingly driven by an economic rationale. In that context, what new forms of public engagement does art need today that extend beyond market mechanisms and event rhetoric?
I still hold an idealist view of art, because I believe it can guide us – at best – into a terra incognita or, alternatively, through a minefield. To me, when done successfully, aesthetics do not affirm my expectations but rather satisfy my curiosity by confronting me with something unfamiliar and “other”. That’s why art needs, above all else, a space that does as little as possible to pre-format its reception. It requires open formats that do not serve a defined purpose and contain a tangible potential of failure.
Art and its institutions swing between continuity and progression, between an awareness of their own history and the courage to venture into the new. What tools does an institution need in order to reflect on its own resources, and to understand this very tension as a tool in itself – one that can be balanced in a productive way?
To start with, it requires a clear commitment on the part of each funding body to support culture as one of the central pillars of a functioning society. That can’t be achieved from a purely business-oriented standpoint. Just last week our administration confronted me with the information that Kolumba has an annual “deficit” of 2.5 million euros. I was staggered and when I asked for clarification, I was told that this sum was the total of all annual expenditures disbursed for Kolumba by the Archdiocese of Cologne. Looked at it in this way, nobody is interested in the fact that our programme’s appeal is built on collaborations and on securing significant levels of external funding. This is why I’m extremely sceptical whenever we in the cultural sector are confronted with marketing concepts that come from corporate consultants in the private sector. The marketing of culture and the criteria for assessing our work must be derived from the content. When it comes to public engagement, you can only be successful if the content is not oriented to a target group with expectations of what to anticipate. Instead, the particular format has to follow from the content. In other words, it has to be a specific offering shaped by the subject matter. The most important “tools” in this respect are a passion for the material, attention to detail and, most importantly, the capacity for critical reflection, innovation and continuity within the team.
Art must and should speak for itself. It should not be instrumentalised or – in the worst case – turned into a tool used to illustrate ideas about society. At the same time, artists take responsibility for the context in which their works are created. How is the conflict between self-expression and social impact reflected in institutions that promote, produce, exhibit, mediate and provide a forum for art?
As curators, we have a responsibility to the artists as well as to the audience. We seek multidimensional ways of conveying the ambiguity of art, and as custodians of the contents we must be prepared to defend them against criticism. When art is attacked, there’s no place for scientific objectivity, we have to take a stand.
At a time when right-wing movements and social upheaval are on the rise, what special tasks do art institutions have today? And what are the lurking pitfalls when an institution positions itself politically?
In light of the growing polarisation and the increasing unwillingness to see a different opinion as an opportunity, I believe that one of the main jobs of culture is to puncture social bubbles. Who, if not us, will use their work to demand tolerance and practise acceptance of the other? One of the biggest pitfalls is to assume that cultural relevance is achieved by chasing trends. Unfortunately, this is something we currently see a lot of. This amounts to a superficial political stance that ultimately falls short because it calculates acceptance rather than risk.
Which three tools are essential in this day and age if an art institution wants to retain its capacity for action and appear credible in a polarised society? And which new or old instruments are needed so that, in the future, places of art can remain relevant for individuals and society?
Those are two questions that must be addressed in different ways. First of all, the people making decisions that affect us need to have an interest in art and culture themselves. There needs to be real political support beyond the lip service given during a visit to the Wagner Festival. Secondly, there needs to be a reliable funding basis that is independent of quantitative performance indicators, as well as sustainable management of our budget resources, including, for example, the possibility of rolling over unused project funds. Thirdly, as is the case in many other areas, there needs to be a major reduction in bureaucracy, as well as absolute independence of all content-related decision-making (including vis-à-vis support organisations such as “societies of friends”).
The second part of your question hinges upon art – and aesthetic education – being given a very different role. In past decades, museums and exhibition venues have gone to great lengths to offer low-threshold concepts and full-service educational approaches that, in my eyes, generally go too far or come across as overly contrived. Genuine participation requires attention and a willingness to become involved, meaning that I have to allow others to fill the space available to me with their own content. Yet all of this remains irrelevant as long as art continues to lose visibility in the media. Why, and for whom, does the public broadcaster ARD broadcast its report “Wirtschaft vor Acht” (Business Before Eight) every evening ahead of the main news? Why not alternate it with “Culture Before Eight”? When and why does art make the front pages of the papers, or the lead article in digital media, unless it happens to be a museum heist or something about Gerhard Richter, who is considered to be “the most important” artist because his work is selling for astronomical sums? Beyond the spectacle, we need nuanced possibilities of mediating art, which we will not achieve without a fundamental rethinking of what we mean by education and what it should encompass.
Translated by Peter Rigney
Stefan Kraus is an art historian and since 2008 has served as director of the Kolumba Museum, the art museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne.