Outside the Art Bubble
The word "pension" comes from the Latin word "pensio," which means "payment," "annuity," or "rent," and it was paid to Roman soldiers after proven services on the battlefield. Well, that doesn't apply to me, it seems, since May 31. It’s also somewhat bitter given today's world. However, I hope that the art and culture sector does not turn into a battlefield with the - perhaps - impending right-wing government.
In my email signature, since May 1st, the first working day of my wonderful successor Roosje Klap, I removed the word director, and the note reads that after May 31st, I will be “doing other useful and enjoyable things.” It’s time to reflect on the past years, with one highlight in particular.
In 2019, we were busy with a multi-year grant application and had asked that year’s guest curator, Hester Keijser, to collaborate. Earlier, we had discussed the intensity of the program for our international photo festival of that year, TAXED TO THE MAX, which focused on the impact of multinational corporations on our daily lives. No matter how complicated the themes we want to address are, the audience needs to see perspective and be able to consider their own part as essential. That creates involvement and puts it on a pedestal.
Hester showed me a video by a certain Sarah Carlier. You looked from the street through a shop window at a tightly packed marching band playing some kind of oom-pah music. It was called “The Play” and dates back to 2008. I burst out laughing. Not because of the struggling musicians, who had barely any space to take a step, but because of the whole scene. Carlier had managed to cram a marching band into a small shop and elevate it to a performance art piece that made everyone happy, but also made you think: “What on earth is this?” Well, that question strengthens your observation, and then you start looking closely. Stimulating so-called visual literacy. We at Noorderlicht find that, along with contemporary photography, the most important thing about our work.
No matter how ambitious your art is, when you take people outside the art bubble seriously, they usually join in wholeheartedly. Only then does your work have a real impact. It’s quite a journey to fill a capital art museum with one’s own parish, but how challenging is it to step out and seek your audience there? Sarah Carlier knew that and put it into practice that way. We included the work as an example in our application, because it brought lightness to our program without being flat, as well as The Blue Struggle, a video work in which you see men wrestling in slow motion, giving their fight something tender. It was successful: the application was approved.
A year later, I contacted Sarah and we made an appointment. During our conversation, the idea arose to first organize a residency at Noorderlicht Studio, our place for experimentation and talent development since early 2021, where Sarah could meet creative people from the region. This could then be followed by an exhibition of work from people in the region and new work by Sarah herself.
Through Sarah, I learned about the work of Mose Tolliver, the folk art artist from the US, who is her great inspiration because he, like Joseph Beuys, recognized the artist in everyone. I became acquainted with “The Hague Organic Outdoor Folk Museum,” her project in The Hague Forest during the Corona pandemic, and listened intently to Sarah’s plea for good, sincere art with a low threshold. Here is an image-maker, I thought, for whom the social context and contact with the people around her are ingrained.
So we got to work. Sarah spread A4 sheets all over Groningen calling for creatively active people to contact her, with tear-off strips of her phone number at the bottom. “Will there be any response?” I wondered. And what kind of responses? But we were overwhelmed with messages from people who were creatively engaged in various ways without directly calling themselves artists. Noorderlicht Studio became a hub of activity. Her perseverance inspired me. Who else would sit from morning till night in front of a weathered sculpture of a pig’s head in a street in Groningen, making a cast of it? Sarah does, and in doing so, she connects with the people in the neighborhood and engages in conversation with them.
But there is something else. Using photography as a starting point, Carlier seeks out the boundaries of that medium, and that matched up nicely with what we want as a photography institution. Photography is the most democratized form of visual culture with a longstanding reach inside and outside the circuit of culture-lovers. Photography was the end goal of many of the institutions that dealt with that medium. But now a more multifaceted horizon beckons. From photography, there is a movement toward film and video, and let’s not forget the communication of imagery through social media and artificial intelligence that is making its stormy entrance.
This mix of originally “lens-based media” is colorful and has a significant impact on our image formation. Therefore, the interdisciplinary nature of Sarah’s work is important. It reaches people and also connects to the development of the photography discipline. That’s why it’s wonderful that under Roosje’s leadership, the exhibition “Pixel Perceptions” is scheduled for this fall. Noorderlicht has a bright future ahead!
Sarah Carlier’s eventual exhibition in 2021 was called “Muddy Pink Dinosaur,” named after a work by Mose Tolliver, and it was a success. Currently, an overview of Sarah Carlier’s work is on display at the Corrosia Expo in Almere. I had the honor of giving the opening speech, parts of which are included in the text above.
Kees van der Meiden – in a personal capacity
