The story of art and culture in Hamburg's Hafencity is a series of flops. Although considerable amounts of public money have been spent, what else would you expect from ill-titled projects like "10° Kunst - Wege in die Hafencity" ("10 Degrees Art - Ways into the Hafencity")? Seen by nobody, such efforts went internationally ignored and unrecognised by the artworld. Many Hamburgers, once proud of the city's art in public space projects, are embarrassed and quickly change the subject.
But even in sleepy Hamburg with it's un-inovative boom and it's placid real estate market, the Florida talk of "creative cities" got about - and meanwhile the absolute absence of cutting-edge, offbeat culture in the Hafencity is felt as a deficit in estate agent circles. Consequently, the Hafencity GmbH employed a Martin Köttering, a mushy character currently liquidating Hamburg artschool Hochschule für bildende Künste (HfbK), to develop a 10 day festival there. Köttering, supported by once leftist turncoat Robert Fleck, wants to show international ("global") Off-art, selected by "20, 30, 40 scouts" - in a temporary construction made from (oops!) - containers. The specious idea is supported by about every foundation in town - the Körber Stiftung, the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, the Kulturbehörde Hamburg - with the biggest sum of money coming from the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, whose boss Hortensia Völckers a few years ago boasted about how her foundation sponsors critical urbanist projects… How comes, all these honourable foundations suddenly support a festival, invented by a real-estate-development agency, with tax-payers money?
Political power today does not ignore subcultures, does not see them any longer as marginal, dangerous and subversive, but increasingly as "creative industry" - as the driving, most advanced, experimental and innovative sector in economy. So "off" suddenly is "on": a considerable number of people assumes today, that all other parts of economy follow the styles and lifestyles developed in musical subcultures. Clearly art, grafic design, fashion and advertising do - but in the end, you can't even sell a car or a computer without a cool image...
Art is a game of precision
Musical and artistic subcultures have gained in importance and influence, but they are being monitored, and instrumentalized - in "regeneration schemes" (aka: gentrification), for instance. Cooptation is lingering at every corner...
So, if you want to still have the "power of definition" in your own cultural field, if you want to tell the difference between platforms that screen your subjectivity (as web 2.0 projects MySpace or Youtube do) and, say, self-determined platforms of exchange, (like your favourite hang-out, or collectively organised bicycle workshop) it has become even more important to be precise in practice and terminology.
In the meantime in the chamber of commerce...
The change of paradigm from infrastructure to culture-as-infrastructure becomes very visible in Hamburg. Coming back to the example of the Hafencity, a vast area of derelict harbour territory, to be developed into a profitable office area.
The Hafencity Hamburg is a part of the former harbour of the same size as the historic centre of the city. When the project was launched towards the end of the 90ies, the then socialdemocratic government promised – as always in such cases – the project would be realised without any state subsidy. In contrast: The Hafencity project would even generate money (from the sale of the land), that in turn would finance the extension and modernisation of the harbour, Eurogate.
New in the Shelf: Top Down Production of Desires
An illusion from the beginning, these dreams collapsed completely after the crash of the New Economy in 2000. Quickly, the city developed a new project, to make the harbour city attractive: the Olympic Games 2010. The city applied for this, and in the time of the bid, the government changed from red-green to a coalition of the conservatives with the right wing populist Schill Party. This Schwarz-Schill coalition developed two things: the overall concept Wachsende Stadt (Growing City), and, a campaign-like-policy that produced and channelized desires. The campaign was Hamburg’s Olympic bid and tremendously popular, especially amongst the bourgeoisie. It’s slogan Feuer und Flamme für Hamburg 2010 (Fire and Flames for Hamburg 2010) not only expressed the desire, that there is no stopping now in the international race of regional competition – it also leans heavily on a favorite slogan of the 80ies militants „fire and flames for this state“. For a while, locally prominent Hamburgers were looking down from posters everywhere in diabolic black and white, holding flames in their hands, as if the competition and sports were a new satanic cult, the new religion.
Luckily, the Olympic bid failed already on a national level – most likely because the image-film produced by Hamburg was a mess. Hamburg had imployed Helmut Dietl, a mainstream TV-filmmaker, who produced a supposedly selfreflective clip, that showed the application for the Olympic Games from the perspective of the leader of the advertising campaign. The man is not sure what to do, what is the unique selling point, that would place Hamburg in front of everybody else. The campaign leader’s son finally has the idea: it’s (surprise surprise) the people, that make the difference, as they are all passionate fans of the Olympic Games in Hamburg. The final shot of the clip – and the absolute climax of the whole film - was to be shot in a big happening with thousands of volunteers in Hamburg Rathausmarkt, the central square. But this final shot could never be made. On the day, hundreds of activists, supporters of the just-evicted construction trailer camp Bambule (also a victim of the imagecity politics of the Schwarz Schill Senate), had appeared at the occasion, carrying protest signs and showing fuck-fingers to the camera, sustainably spoiling the shoot... So the clip in the end had to do with a sad, short pan shot along a few casted actors posing as Hamburgers with candles – and the clip went onto the heap of history. As did Hamburg’s Olympic bid.
The city, however, had learned a lot from this: with the Olympic campaign, the upper tenthousands of politics and economy had had lots of reasons to meet and dine together, to organize, to publish, to give each other jobs etc. The campaign was a state supported economy program for the rich, and a tool to create identification with neoliberal programs for the masses.
Ship Shaped Architectures
However, Hafencity still didn't take off, after the pet project to trigger the development there, was blown to pieces. So the Senate - advised by the chamber of commerce – started a series of new projects, all having to do with culture:
- the chamber of commerce founded the „Hamburg Maritime Foundation“, which, in turn, developed projects in support of Hamburg as maritime image-city.
- the cultural board was advised to spend it’s public art funds preferably in the Hafencity and the areas south of Hamburg, to culturally support the redevelopment scheme „Jump over the Elbe“, reaching out to gentrify the relatively cheap areas south of the harbour.
The Maritime Foundation is led by the same lawyer in the chamber of commerce, Reinhard Wolf, whose job the application for the Olympics had been. Significantly, Wolf had been responsible for infrastructure in the past. Just one example for the weight, economy is giving to culture now. This also means, that images and cultural money are probably being controlled even more tightly... The chamber of commerce / maritime foundation initiated the project „BallinStadt– port of dreams“, a museum housed in rebuilt emigrationhalls (originally from 1905), from where many emigrants, especially from the east, and many jews fleeing pogromes in Russia – started their journey to America. The port of dreams is telling - as you can imagine - a soft, depoliticized and trivialized story (state subsidy: 9 Million Euro). Next thing on their list is a „Hafenerlebnispark“ (harbour event park, subsidy: 15 Million Euro). Also a member of the Maritime Foundation is a Peter Tamm, right wing collector of Nazi memorabilia, and founder, and director of the Maritime Museum to be opened soon (subsidy: over 30 Million Euros).
The areas south of the Elbe are to be redevoleped and gentrified by a project called IBA (International Building Exhibition), budget: 100 Million Euro. The team of IBA was recruited (again) from the ranks of the planners of the failed Hamburg Olympics.
Biggest project in this bracket: the Elbphilharmonie – a Herzog and De Meuron design in the sentimental shape of a ship, that will cost more than 280 Million Euros, most of the money a direct subsidy by Hamburg.
Will all this work to create a millieu attractive to the Bobos and global Investors? I doubt it, and others seem to have doubts as well. As I elaborated in my introduction, subcultures are vital for the post industrial image-economies - and obviously missing - in Hafencity still today. So the Hafencity GmbH (Ltd.) asked the director of the Hamburg Art School, a Martin Köttering, to organize a festival called subvision to be housed in containers in the Hafencity.
Conspicuous Flexibilism
Hamburg has a tradition of housing unwanted people in containers: for years, refugees were housed in container ships on the river, as if the city authorities wanted to say unmistakeably clear to the refugees, that they have not found a new home in Hamburg. For the subvision exhibition in provisorical containers, international members of the off-scene (whatever that is) are to be invited. And to us this seems to express quite clearly: that one wants the soft side of the alternative scene, it's products, but leave the producers, their smell, the problems – and the unwieldiness that comes along with art scenes – at home...
In all cities, artists and subcultures have to fight for autonomous places and selforganised spaces. It is the artist's job, to ask themselves, if they want to play with the rules imposed by others - or if there are other ways. In the past, subcultures had developed harsh exclusion mechanisms against people regarded as "fake", "posers" or "uncool". Maybe this cultural elitism should make a return - as a tool to detect and deter people, structures and mechanisms, out to destroy the very subcultures they live from. artists are well advised, to act out this arrogance against stupid endeavors like Martin Köttering's subvision containershow.
The art institutions, however, would be well advised, not to spend any public money on private real estate development - but much rather return to their very own raison d'etre - the defense of artistic autonomy vis-a-vis the forces of markets and party politics. if subvision is realized - nearly the complete budget for art in public space (Hamburger Programm für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum) in 2008 will be spent in ten days of questionable quality.
Very questionable also the practice of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes: the juristical term "accepting advantage" was used to describe, that Dr. Christoph Heinrich (then Director of Hamburg Kunsthalle - Galerie der Gegenwart) as a member of the jury, decided to give nearly half a million Euros of taxpayers money to the subvision project, whose advisory board member Hubertus Gassner (Director of Hamburg Kunsthalle) was at the time of application - his boss...
For some years, it looked as if the Kulturstiftung des Bundes were the long awaited foundation that would sponsor experimental and critical projects - balancing the overweight of market forces. One could very well argue, that exactly this would be the very job of a cultural foundation. I want to close with a a look at the guidelines of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes "Kunst und Stadt" Themenschwerpunkt: "The Cultural Foundation's programme "Art and the City" deals with the role of the city as the central motif and preferred transmission site of contemporary art. The programme's guideposts are those profound transformations that often become visible on the aesthetic level and affect society well before their wider social significance is generally recognised and understood. Two opposing global trends can currently be discerned which are both decisively changing our perception of urban reality. On the one hand we have the explosive growth of megacities in South America and Asia. On the other, the "shrinking cities" - former industrial centres now marked by depopulation and economic decline - are harbingers of perhaps the most momentous urban transformation since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Together with the globalisation of our world of experience, these new and sometimes rapid developments have considerably shaken the conventional notion of the (European) city. We no longer possess a universally applicable urban image, neither as a guiding cultural ideal nor as a model for interventions of architects and town planners. The programme "Art and the City" wishes to contribute to the sounding out of this newly-emerged urban complexity, to encourage its broader investigation and to establish its contemporary and future significance for our culture."
Anti-Universallism is no excuse for losing all moral principels.
Somehow, I always suspected this type of lingo to be another sort of class-language.
thinks, your
Virginia Craven,
March 2008
PS: For some reason, this text has dissappeared from the net for some time... Now the original is back.
PPS: I am not a person signing as "a"
PPPS: I have nothing to do with subvision websites of fake subvision websites
PPPS: This article has now been published in the US-Magazine "Proximity" (Chicago), issue 3, Winter 2008 - 2009
http://virginworld.blog.de/2009/01/15/subvision-hafencity-art-money-real-estate-5379535/
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