Program Cultural City by Jochen Gerz

Published in German in LETTRE Spring 2007, p. 28 – 29

Translation from German into English: Hatto Fischer

Sub-title: “To play the public like a theatre or writing like a book”

During 2005 Cork was European Cultural Capital. Since then they are discussing there the question what makes a city into a cultural city. Does it mean to create a new city or to erect from the ground a new city quarter? Certainly not. Fore mostly it is a matter of questioning the existing structures of a city and to change them, according to need to replace or to preserve them. To create or to produce something means always to deal with the given and to take into consideration its history, present and significance as a context. This context wants to be heard, discovered, remembered and presented in public. It shows that even the most radical concept of creativity is still committed to the idea of mimesis. It has little to do with a widely spread concept in aesthetics that creative work is brought about by an original bang in nothingness. That concept can be traced back to the Biblical story about Creation according to which the world had been founded within seven days with the decisiveness in that regard is the breath-taking speed in which everything took place apparently. Only miracles are faster than creativity. Yet it is well known that science has expressed doubt in this seven day genesis of the world, and many people agree that today’s world cannot be traced back to creativity or a miracle. It took a lot of time – much time.

I want to say with that that it takes time to create something, and even more time to bring something sustainable into life. One does not create a city like a painting. A city is not a painting. It is a ongoing process in which nothing is completed. Here ‘creation’ is not a single act, but a process stretched over time. One could use instead of the concept ‘creation’ even such concepts as ‘position’ and ‘attitude’. Thus it would be possible to discuss the attitudes of the people towards their city and their expectations as to mobility, experiences and – why not – also festivities. The cultural city is a place for creative people, not only for cultural buildings and institutions. We have still to learn to valorize our own creative potentials just as much as our pyramids. People are independently of origin and backgrounds extremely creative, if one only lets them to be - when one gives them the courage and invites them to trust their own genius.

With that I come to ‘culture’. In a city there exist two worlds: the inner city with its books, concerts, films, art exhibitions, theatre performances and readings and the other world out there, also called ‘public space’. The latter is the world of benches, bridges, tracks, streets and squares, the advertisement with posters and alleys with trees, the gardens, cars and airplanes – a paradise for engineers. Without deepening too much the contrast, one can say on the one hand there exists a world of culture and on the other hand there is the world of regulations and of bureaucracy. If we wish to create a cultural city, then these two worlds have to come to a peace agreement and work together. The rational outer world and the creative world inside of us must learn how to go together.

Until recently both worlds refuse to give access to the not permitted and ‘not qualified’ population. Decisions are taken behind closed doors and without participation by the public. The new reunited world must become more transparent and give exactly to those who have not been asked so far to do so the chance to shape things jointly. Only then can they leave behind traces in public. Culture means (at least in conjunction with a cultural city) more than institutions, museums and opera houses. They too belong to that, but the ones creating culture and city administrations would make a huge mistake, if they overlooked what is the fascination but also the challenge to be a cultural city.

The human being as resource

Culture is the all encompassing reality of democracy. I do not need as a matter of fact to point out, that democracy not always existed really and that it may never come about. We have still to learn to appraise better our presence in public. If we do not succeed in that, then pre-vails the danger that ever more people turn to self acclaimed leaders and anti democratic systems. Once people do not recognize the clear difference between democratic and undemocratic relationships and do not sense, that in the first case they have to articulate themselves substantially, then they can turn one day their backs to democracy. Perceived as such it means ‘culture’ is a new and at the same time original concept of democracy. It brings about new, ancient mechanisms of public hearings, examinations, recognitions and governance. It means a significant feed-back in terms of knowledge, competences, authorities and creativity from the institutions of administration, politics and culture to the public. It unfolds itself in a common implementation of intelligence and creativity in the city, through which our wish to make this place into the most exciting, intelligible and beautiful is expressed in the best way.

In order to give a concrete example taken from own experiences as visual artist: when a city administration, a region or official institution wants to realize public art or a monument, they are consciously clear what they want. That at least one should assume. As a matter of fact in most of the cases the public contractor stipulates only a few conditions with regards to the bureaucratic process, place and materials to be used. The public as actual user having benefit from the work does not play any role whatsoever when designating the public work. Often it is even more so that neither the administration nor the politicians themselves know about the purpose of the work nor do they want to know. When I asked a representative of a city which I did not know asked, what they expect from me, I got the reply: “Make art”.

In the vacuum, which we call the democratic process, artists are almost forced, following the example of other lobbies, to demand for themselves from the political bodies and administrations a power to shape things, something which would be better if shared with the public. With that the artists give away the chance to remain faithful to themselves and to shape their works in a sustainable manner. When a matter of negotiating with various groups of the public, which are most often not used to being involved in such decisions, I do not hesitate to use the word ‘consensus’. An informed, participating and experienced public is a better promotion of the arts. It makes possible courageous works. And it is the courageous works which make a city more economically attractive. Only still another water game is there definitely too little. For just as the city so as well tourism is becoming a cultural enterprise. People like meanings. They do not search for technical games, but something, that makes sense in their eyes. It is a contradiction to send children to school so that they can learn, and who are treated later in their ‘active’ life only as consumers or audiences.

Which topics can be negotiated in public, and which are essentially of public interest? Public means here not only public space, but over and beyond that the social life and public opinion. The Greek term agora signifies that we do not have to invent completely anew the wheel. What makes any city actually into a great place? Richard Florida would say: its people. Exactly that is it: the people and their history, their memories, their geography, locality and economy, their neighboring cities and partner cities, their land, their problems and scandals, their taboos, their needs, their festivals, their athletes, their art, their writers, their river, their boots, their architecture, their discussions, their histories, their judges, their platforms, their ecological, voluntary and spiritual initiatives, their chat forums for patients in hospitals, their political projects, their debates about public transport and so forth. The people are the most important resources of a cultural city. The public spirit is the blood in their arteries. But before the people can assume a public role, they have to be invited for that and be given the necessary knowledge. What had been banished until now into the exile of the private sphere, has to be made public. All that exists here and there in Europe, or at least it is being discussed. It can be only useful to the economy, liveliness and image of a city, and it makes a city all the more attractive. To remind: I do not talk here about individual monuments, bridges or buildings. I am speaking about a continuous program of public articulation and debate. With ‘culture’ I mean the attempt to overcome the contradiction between the tangible and intangible aspect of the city.

Potential of the media

There is no lack of bridges between the cultural and the public world. The media and communication technologies are such public spaces, only they are at the moment predominantly established and used in private quarters. We attribute to them in first line commercial purposes, although they operate in spaces, which we associate with private and cultural activities. Newspapers, television, Internet and mobile phones could transcend established borders, but still we insist to link them with the technical-rational world. We see only their hardware and not their software. But in culture it is all a matter of the program – better: the possibility to program.

When there is talk about the media, we often differentiate strictly between their technical and their cultural functions. In fact both depend, however, upon the development of hardware and software. We are inclined moreover to the conviction, that finally only the empirical and the functional is going to be taken serious. Transferred upon a cultural city it means that: the city was always the same, is the same and shall remain to be the same regardless any renewal, art or design which we wish to undertake. When we want to create a cultural city, it is said by necessity and often unfortunately as well, to continue with that what we know to do the best. But it means at the same time, to develop a critical consciousness, in order to avoid exactly this eternal doing just the same.

No technology (whether photography, video, Internet or other) has ever been invented with a cultural, never mind artistic purpose. But the extra value, which a technology obtains through a cultural use, that is becoming ever more apparent, and so it is conceivable that also the predominant commercial function of the media and communication technology shall be called in a short while extensively into question. The first messengers of the cultural society are probably precisely the many new commercial technologies. Often it does not take long, until that, what we call ‘culture’ appropriates such technology, and then it is merely a matter of time when the rest of the economy chases after this ‘avantgarde’. That, what we call culture, is accordingly more a passage than a beginning or an end.

Media and communication technologies contain enormous potentialities. They are an indication for the most important change, which is expecting us, provided the ‘cultural city’ does not remain as an empty phrase: our concept of culture has to be extended and must include the public. The public is a not to be exhausted book shelf, stage, screen, and map in one – and again I speak here only about the hardware. Actually it should say: the public space must be programmed. The public must be played like a theatre or written like a book. Public openness is there, where the city is being offered, played, remembered, created and changed each day. The city is not being created for but von someone – not by the consumers, but by its authors and originators, the population. At the centre of change stands a pluralistic, collective authorship.

Generating originators

The cultural is nowadays a program for the time after work. It is a program for people whose desire for entertainment does not terminate with the end of the working day and who can find their way also in a world with a lot of leisure time and muse. For we are experiencing the beginning of the end of work in the traditional sense, and that is as well the reason, why so many people write and discuss about the ‘cultural industries’. Culture was and is until today our consensus for the weekend. But now work is disappearing on us. The work which does exist, this we no longer want, and the occupation which we had learned at school, exists no longer. Very soon it is conceivable that we shall perceive work in the traditional sense in very similar terms such as ‘environmental pollution’. It is getting to be too expensive, in a rapidly increasing world population to occupy all people with the production of things which later on have to be decontaminated or reused. It is getting to be too expensive to clean up the chaos at work. The consumption is no longer soon the entire pride of Western culture. Very soon the ideal of the Western economy can have exhausted itself – especially then, when our planet becomes more hostile to human beings and when we can no longer produce ourselves that what we consume. We have till now a consensus about the weekend and what concerns leisure time and which one calls ‘culture’. In Germany leading entrepreneurs are discussing already in public a basic income for all citizens, whether poor or rich. They say: people have to be able to recognize a sense in work. They need many possible choices. Many beautiful and interesting works will not be paid any longer in future. And we have to be in a position, that we decide what we wish to work for. These entrepreneurs say: to earn money is not a sufficient reason to undertake some work.

Divided responsibility

It is still a matter of the city. Naturally we cannot create a cultural city on a small island. It needs cultural suburbs and even better in addition a cultural hinterland. In the United States and in a view countries of Europe (Scandinavia, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, but also England and Ireland) there are being discussed right now concepts like ‘creative economy’ and ‘cultural society’. In that process culture is developing rapidly into a comprehensive metaphor for social programming, and we can conceive the public space as necessity and chance for programming. A city can also be understood as a huge, interactive school black board in order to describe, erase, recollect and forget. That is the imagination of a cultural city, which leaves and gives space for the contributions by authors coming from all parts of the population and for new mish forms made out of traces, reports of experiences, criticisms, ideas and proofs. It assists to give human presence another way of articulation. And this difference makes itself felt not only in the general infrastructure, which we call ‘public’, but also and as a part of it in the contemporary art in the public space.

The barrier between the private and the public must fall, if we do not want ourselves to lock ourselves into a continental, national or urban enclave made out of privileges. The cultural city is a child of democracy. We can begin, the intelligent tools, which we invent and construct, to share with ourselves. We can educate the engineers in ourselves how to make cultural use of our inventions. We can learn how to be ourselves and how to confront ourselves with ourselves. We have the time, in order to play and to communicate ourselves. The cultural city is no place for violence, noise, silence. It is a futuristic factory in which articulation is created day and night. It creates intelligence and a language, which orientates itself more based on mutual respect and recognition than on power. In this factory creativity means res publica, the public intention, and not the prominence for only a few.

Therefore the cultural can step out of the hidden private sphere of creativity – out of this ‘theater of secrecy’ (or the ‘tyranny of intimacy’, as Richart Sennett expressed it) of the postindustrial society. In the cultural city it is a matter of asking where do lie the priorities, where to collect the forces and in which direction flows the money. The decision has been made: priority has the public debate about controversial topics and as dispute, about memory and as memory, about information and as information. There must and it can be a public debate, which generates intelligence and originality and a consciousness for shared responsibility than fore mostly for separated privileges. Therefore the cultural city is a challenge not only for the city of today, but above all for the present culture.

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Program Cultural City by Jochen Gerz