The Host and his Guests

In town planning the phenomenon of the emptying and decline of the urban centre in certain large cities and the subsequent concentration of the middle classes in the outlying residential areas is known as the "donut effect." The artist and critic Carles Guerra has recovered the analogy of the donut, the concentric mass organised around an empty centre, to describe Tilo Schulz's work. The following text takes a deeper look at this German artist's work, devoting special attention to "The return of the display. The exhibition in 2030", his most recent project in collaboration with DAE and with support from Arteleku which has been taking place in various places in Donostia throughout July and August.

What is the hole in Schulz's donut? Take for example "Exhibition Without Exhibition," a project carried out between 1997 and 1999. For "E.W.E", Schulz invited six artists (Olaf Nicolai, Nathan Coley, Plamen Dejanow & Swetlana Heger, Jens Haaning and Sandra Hastenteufel) to present various projects. These would later take the form of small catalogues that would be accompanied by lectures, information posters, invitation cards, advertising... That is, just as its title indicates, this is an exhibition in which absolutely all the classic peripheral elements of an exhibition appear, but in which the central element, the object on display, is missing.

In accordance with this, it could be interpret that Schulz's work, heir to the conceptual art of the 70's (to be more precise, to Lawrence Weiner's work) and a complex meta-linguistic discourse, remains on the fringes of the objet d'art. But this is not the case. Because although it is well known that this omission ("the objet d'art is shown through its absence") is significant ("... so the subject of the exhibition is the missing object"), it is also generally known that the hole in the donut has no taste (and that the objet d'art has fortunately ceased to be the priority question in the current debate about art).

So to put it one way, this artist's work, (he was born in Leipzig), is eccentric (as opposed to "concentric"). Clinging to the very structures and mechanisms of art that he repeatedly calls into question, his work moves around in an amalgam of areas whose profound connections do not became clear at a first reading (from which, if I have to be honest, the reader emerges rather bewildered). These are the mediation of information, design and the model, the audience or audiences, the idea of fiction (either as oral narrative at a lecture, written narrative on posters or catalogues, or as a virtual exhibition such as in the cases of "The real and the fake" and "E.W.E."), collaboration with other people who contribute with their work (artists, curators, critics...), certain themes that are typical of "cultural studies" such as the myth of the American West, women's football or town planning...

And if Schulz doesn't produce objets d'art, what is then the role that this German (born in 1972) plays with regard to his projects? Curator and mediator in other people's work (because artistic activity is, above all, mediation), an information designer (because information, in order to be considered and read, requires a design), lecturer and organiser of events such as country music concerts (because artistic activity in the form of mediation is not just restricted to visual presentation inside a gallery)..., if I had to describe in one image the role that Schulz plays in his projects, it would the image of a host.

How to explain "The return of the display"
Perhaps describing his latest project in Donostia, "The return of the display. The exhibition in 2030", may be the best way to help us understand work that requires so many complex levels of interpretation. For this current project, Schulz has invited four European critics and curators (Charles Esche, Carles Guerra, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt and Lisette Smits) to write a text in response to the question: "what is the future of the exhibition in 2030?" Each of these proposals has been published in a trilingual version (English, Basque and Spanish) as a poster which Schulz has produced a specific design for. Over June and August every two or three weeks, a company has had the job of sticking each of the posters on various walls in the streets of San Sebastián, as a coverage strategy with a mass repeated pattern whose possibilities Schulz had already explored within the context of the gallery in "Body of work: the ideal exhibition". In this way the posters have coexisted (and fought for public attention and space) with other posters advertising fiestas and concerts. Like these they have also disappeared, buried under just so many other new posters that contribute in this way to the endless renewal of the urban landscape.

The four posters have also been distributed free of charge in various places in the city (clothes shops and record shops, bookshops, libraries, galleries...). The project was rounded off by a lecture by Tilo Schulz himself at the Goikoa Palace, where he spoke on three subjects: the work of the late-19th century American sculptor, Frederic Remington, who, twenty years after the last cowboy disappeared from the prairies of the Midwest, helped to shape one of the most "genuinely" American myths with his sculptures of horsemen; "Sunrise over yellow stripes", a previous project in collaboration with the Westfälischer Kunstverein consisting of a series of events (three lectures and a concert) which took place inside and outside the centre and, to finish off, this same project.

Philip K. Dick, the science-fiction writer, claimed that, "if bad science-fiction predicts, good science-fiction pretends to predict". According to this, three of the four stories en response to the question "What will be the future of the exhibition in 2030?" would form part of the first category, which, depending on which way you look at it, can be interpreted in various ways. Because, although these three texts do not work as literature (whereas Guerra's proposal does), the disintegration of artistic structures that they presage is perfectly plausible: Gordon-Nesbitt proposes cyberspace as the only valid place for the arts; Smits advocates squatting in abandoned museums and galleries as a form of protest against an untrammelled consumer society; Esche, apparently without a trace of irony, proclaims the democratisation of the arts in a world in which absenteeism from work is the norm and in which (oh!) the artistic institutions, as well as taking on the job of a democratic forum, are offered as a refuge for the really underprivileged.

In any case, these four texts, rather than predicting, betray the ineffectiveness in 2001 of the model followed for presenting exhibitions and of the artistic institutions that house these. To a certain extent, this is where the most conflictive aspect in some of Schulz's latest work lies: its dependence on the very same structures that it is responsible for dismantling. Escaping from the abyss of the hole in the donut and its concentric elements to venture into the most extreme forms of eccentricity could be a possible solution. Or maybe it won't be.

Miren Jaio. Published in Mugalari/Gara, 25/08/2001

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