The prospect of having performance artists dressed up like Disney’s Snow White parading with toy guns in the city hall caused quite a stir in The Hague over the last weeks. It is not that the Dutch are easily scandalized – they are rather hardened in matters of artistic provocation – but the consistency in the branding of a city such as the The Hague is becoming a more important principle than artistic freedom. The Hague likes to present itself as the international capital of peace and justice, and to start with, the officials in charge of city marketing didn’t like the theme chosen by Todaysart festival 2009, “The Hague City of Conflict”.
1. An art event as possible front for terrorist activities
On Saturday 12 September, two weeks before the opening of the two-day event, the festival director, Olof van der Winden, was plucked from his bed by six secret service agents and detained for a day. He and his colleagues were submitted to several interrogations over the following days.
The reason for this surprising arrest – van der Winden has been the festival’s director since it started in 2005, and has always operated openly, in the public eye – was that the secret service had ‘discovered’ videos promoting the festival on Youtube which, according to them, might constitute a threat to the safety of the city.
The videos made by the group ACEDF (acedf.nl) for the festival show the placid Dutch city undergoing 9/11-like terrorist attacks. It was not immediately clear to the secret service who this group was, whence the arrest of the festival director. The acronym stands for Accuse, Confuse, Expose, Divide and Front, and the group is active on Twitter, Youtube and Picasa. Not exactly the kind of social networking sites used by Al Qaeda, but it seems the Dutch counter terrorism branch doesn’t have much to do, and no clue of where to start looking for the elusive terrorist threats.
The videos were shown in a modified version on Todaysart website 2009.todaysart.nl and were the basis for some of the posters used by Todaysart in its promotional campaign. The city was already full of these posters when the secret service made their ‘discovery’.
After it appeared hard to link the festival and its director to planned terrorist activities, Olof was saddled with the accusation that he was inciting to violence. It seems hard to believe that the secret police really believes that Al Qaeda-like terrorist groups will watch the amateurish videos and posters made by young artists and then use those as an inspiration to perpetrate attacks on obvious targets such as the city hall and the International Court of Justice.
Unsurprisingly, there were racist undertones to the investigation. The detention team confided to their detainee that if he had lived a couple of streets further down, where the population is predominantly Muslim, they would have broken down his door. They also wanted to know why one of the festival posters portrays a young Muslim-looking man (with a garland of roses, such as in a martyr’s picture) but they didn’t need to know why another poster shows the festival director in a fascist-like pose.
By then the story had reached the ears of the cultural institutions in The Hague and the media, and the arrest and charges were becoming highly embarrassing to the city officials. The secret service and its perceptive investigators quietly returned to the background and the issue took on a new twist.
2. The Hague capital of peace without conflict
The Hague’s city marketing department does not understand the argument that there is no peace without conflict, and that a city presenting itself as the international capital of peace must deal with issues of conflict as well. They are not subtle enough to see that one should occupy both poles of an issue if one really wants to dominate a narrative.
Frits Huffnagel, who is alderman for city marketing of The Hague since 2006, intervened to redress the damage he thought was being wrought on the city’s pristine image by the festival. Since he couldn’t do much to stop the festival, he tried to at least clear the city hall from manifestations contrary to his branding efforts. He focused all his attention on one of the many events of the festival, the Snow White choreography by Paris-based Catherine Baÿ, which I was producing.
The French choreographer specializes in unique performances of ‘Snow Whites’ throughout the world with locally trained artists, actors and dancers. In her choreographies she confronts mass culture with local cultural issues, in the same way the old fashioned fairy tale adapted itself to its local audience and its concerns before it was progressively standardized and then became one of the first icons of global culture, in Disney’s 1937 movie.
The performance she had planned in the city hall of The Hague would show Snow Whites struggling in their attempts to define a common centre (e.g. international law) versus the centrifugal tendencies of the periphery (the local conflicts it deals with). As in some previous performances, some of the Snow Whites would be armed with toy guns to express the tension between the goody-goody Disney princess and the individual performer incarnating her.
As Huffnagel had his say over the internal services of the city hall but not its cultural programming, he tried to use the security argument to ban the use of toy guns in the performance and in the filming sessions that would precede it. Eventually, after a week of deliberations by the city council, he gave up. There was no real threat; the performance plan had been approved weeks ago by all the city officials, including his department; more importantly, the city didn’t want another row shortly after the detention of the director of Todaysart.
Characteristically, it was the conflict-avoiding stance of the city officials which eventually allowed us to go ahead with our production. We got the green light to go ahead with the production of the Snow Whites performance five days before it was scheduled to take place.
3. Art vs Marketing
On the second day of the festival I participated in an interesting panel discussion on the theme of conflict with three of the artists, the festival director and Hicham Khalidi, the director of <tag>, the exhibition venue where the discussion took place.
Hicham had experienced a third form of threat to artistic freedom of expression. Not the secret service, nor the city marketing department, but a group of local inhabitants had intimidated him. On the façade of the temporary exhibition venue he had mounted a sound installation by the Swiss artist Johannes Gees. Every hour the Islamic call to prayer, progressively mixed with an Ave Maria, resonated through the busy downtown street (Spui).
During the inauguration half a dozen Dutch youth of Moroccan descent had made it clear to him that they didn’t appreciate the call to prayer emanating from a place where there was drinking going on but no worship (they didn’t notice or mind the Ave Maria remix). They threatened they would come with a larger group to shut down his event if he didn’t turn off the installation. They pointed to Hicham’s own Moroccan origins, as if he was somehow betraying his own culture. He vacillated but eventually continued with the sound installation, after having alerted the police. His intimidators returned but avoided a showdown with the police. Thus again the instinct of conflict-avoidance had allowed an artistic manifestation to take place.
The discussion focused on the scope for artistic freedom. The Swiss artist’s position, that he autonomously made his artworks and was not responsible for the way the public reacted to it, was generally found insufficient, even anachronistic. The artist that works in the public space, as he does, cannot ignore the possible reactions of the public. As an artist, or a producer of artistic events, you must seek some kind of relation with the public, be it confrontation.
One person in the audience pointed out that culture was increasingly used as a tool for city marketing, and thus one could understand (if not accept) the position by city officials that when artistic activities were contrary to the brand image the city sought after, they would withdraw their funding. Why continue to feed the artists when they bite your hand?
From a marketing perspective, funding the arts is not intrinsically different to giving a contract to a PR firm to develop a certain brand image. When you’re not satisfied with the results you cancel the contract and look for a new PR firm/producer of artistic events.
This development is felt as hugely threatening by the Dutch art world, which depends almost wholly on public funding, as revenue generation or private funding is almost wholly non-existent here. With the economic crisis and the attendant need to cut public expenses, together with the rise of the populist right, local and national politicians are increasingly tempted to impose specific goals on the arts world – such as promoting a positive cultural image, facilitating the integration of minorities into mainstream society, stimulating local business… not exactly the objectives of a festival such as Todaysart.
The artists and their producers may resent thus being used for political or economic purposes, but they are not in a position to fight it. They need the money. Catherine Baÿ said she wasn’t against sponsoring deals, as long as she could integrate it as an element in her work, instead of seeing it as an external imposition. She asked Jonathan Schipper, an American artist whose main work in Todaysart was ‘The inevitable death of American muscle’ (two cars colliding into each other with great force but at a minimal speed, moving a few feet over four days) whether he would consider a sponsorship deal with the carmakers. He had to think about that, but wasn’t offended at the idea. American artists have gotten used to dealing with market principles long ago.
Finally the discussion returned to the point of departure: Todaysart own marketing campaign, which had caused such upheaval. An artist may try to disavow his responsibility over how the public reacts to his work of art, but professional PR people cannot. So wasn’t the charge of incitation to violence actually justified, if Todaysart was promoting itself through posters of bombed public buildings and videos of planes flying into ministries?
No, said Olof van Winden; we do not make that rigid distinction between art and communication. We gave our graphic designers a large degree of artistic freedom in designing and implementing their own communication campaigns for Todaysart.
The distinction between art and marketing is thus being blurred on both sides. Maybe it is precisely this invasion of artists into the domain of marketing and communication which really upset the city officials in charge of establishing the brand image of The Hague. It somehow threatens their bases.
The growing tension between the freedom of artists and the marketing imperatives of the collectives funding them, may thus prove to be fertile ground for the development of new art forms.
RobertK, 30 September 2009