Carson Chan: In 2007 you became the co-founder of New Patrons in Germany and are today the director of this program. New Patrons is a non-for-profit organization that enables people that have been traditionally marginalized by the art world to commission artworks. Art has traditionally been commissioned by the elite. But the desire to participate in the cultural production extends far beyond those in power.
Alexander Koch: Absolutely, and we are often unaware how important commissioning artworks can be to publicly express ones interests and shape social identity. The artistic commission has been a key component of human culture for thousands of years. Almost all of the canonical artworks from the past are commissions and have patrons. What has never changed really is that most art is produced by and for one percent of the population. 99% of the world is not involved in determining the very culture they inhabit. Why is this so, and why is this necessarily so? The main idea of New Patrons is that anyone who wants to engage in cultural production should have that opportunity. Commissioning from a significant contemporary artist is a complex and challenging process though. We therefore provide a specific methodology and framework. Our program is based on the practice of mediators, to whom anyone can address their urgencies and demands. The mediators then help to chose a suitable artist to meet the needs of the patrons, and assist in the work’s production.
C: It’s almost surprising that infrastructure hasn’t really existed for addressing the non-elite public’s needs. Working with marginalized communities, New Patrons strikes me as providing a model of production that is completely foreign, if not counter to how the art world produces. You’ve worked with many prominent artists like Vito Acconci, Angela Bulloch, and Liam Gillick. If you had to guess, why do you think artists are interested in what you are doing?
A: I believe that many artists are truly interested and concerned with the societal dimensions of what they do. In the end, artists with long professional practices in the international art world often deal with a very particular and segmented part of the population only, and they experience commissions by citizens as a great way to get in direct contact with larger social realities again.
C: Take me through the process of how someone can commission a work of art through New Patrons.
A: We start by communicating the existence of the program, particularly in regions or countries where we feel peoples needs don’t meet the conditions to be considered. Gerrit Gohlke, director of the Brandenburgischer Kunstverein in Potsdam, did this very well in the Brandenburg region around Berlin. It’s an area that has been suffering economically for a host of reasons after Germany reunified. Gerrit literally drove from one little town to the next, talking to people in the streets, asking them about their concerns, and telling them about New Patrons. He met some people in Pritzwalk that were concerned about their city center. It was dying, the stores were empty, and they were desperate about the development of the community. As a dialog between the mediator and the citizens developed, more people joined in, culminating in a project by Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann two years later. That initiative activated hundreds of citizens that were able to voice their cultural demands and civic ideas. 70 individual projects came out of it, and the process concluded with a collective portrait that Clegg & Guttmann made of Pritzwalk’s citizens. The project has sustainable effects. It prompted the foundation of the city’s art association, where none existed before, and there’s now an art center that the citizens run themselves. Projects like this usually get a lot of press, and then communities in surrounding regions will contact us, that’s how new commission come up. This is how New Patrons spread through France, where it was founded in 1992. Over the years, French mediators have realized around 350 commissions by French citizens throughout the country.
C: New Patrons started in 1992, almost as a kind of artistic manifesto or provocation by artist Francois Hers. You joined New Patrons in 2007 at the same time you co-founded KOW gallery in Berlin, which to my mind represents some of contemporary art’s strongest cultural critics. Renzo Martens, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Tobias Zielony, and Hito Steyerl, for example. Galleries are retail spaces, businesses that necessarily see art as commodity. Was your involvement in New Patrons, in a non-commercial initiative for art, a response to your work as a gallerist?
A: Not exactly. From the start my partner at KOW, Nikolaus Oberhuber, and I see a dialectical relationship with New Patrons. As gallerists we mediate the needs and agendas of artists to a subset of the public, namely art lovers, collectors, institutions, journalists, and curators. By contrast, New Patrons is a mechanism that mediates the needs of everyone else to artists. Galleries have a limited field of action. Even if our artists and we are interested in the social dimensions of art, the gallery system comes with natural boundaries that restrict those interests. Where production in the gallery ends, it begins for New Patrons.
C: Is part of New Patrons’ mission pedagogical? To educate the 99% and let them know that they have the power to be cultural producers?
A: Well, I wouldn’t say, “educate.” In the art world, for the past several decades, we’ve developed a language that is fairly difficult to share with the general public. It’s not that people don’t understand art, but rather we’ve made too little effort to make ourselves understandable. Even though there is much art about common topics and issues, about concerns shared by people everywhere, links are missing. The moment you take people seriously, start listening to them, and bring them into discussion with good artists, a shared language emerges. A learning process does develop as projects mature: people realize that art can become really meaningful and significant in their lives.
C: As you said, contemporary art operates in its own esoteric language. How have you seen contemporary art be meaningful for someone uninitiated?
A: When I was at art school, I asked my first professor if there was a book I could read to understand Western philosophy. She said that I could start with any book by any philosopher, and the rest will come. I think art is the same way. I was visiting Cameroon two years ago, and people kept telling me about the genocide in the 1950s where the French killed around 50,000 Cameroonians. Until recently, the French denied that any of this took place. When I asked what they would think about commissioning a monument to this tragedy, people responded saying they didn’t know how to commission such things, that they didn’t know anything about art, but if it meant that there would be something we can all see that manifests the existence of the genocide, then that would be a momentous change in the country and they would go for it. Such conversations in Cameroon have started our activity there.
C: I like that New Patrons’ commissions provides an alternate temporality for how art happens today. Artists are expected to constantly produce, exhibit in galleries, fairs, and biennials, to give talks and speak on panels, and to publish books. New Patrons’ projects often take several years to realize, some more than a decade. The producing of the work has time to embed itself into a context.
A: This is in fact the main difference between us and other major funding and production programs I’m aware of. Nothing is taken as a given in our process. Before artists are even involved, there are no preconceived ideas about timeframe, the media or form the work will take, or the budget. Introducing artists into the process helps determine these parameters to the point where we can start applying for funding, but still then things can change to react on how the situation develops.
C: The extended timeframe seems to allow art making become a lived experience for the community. It’s not really about the work in the end, as it is about the nonlinear, creative process of making ideas into objects.
A: It’s the ambition to create a significant work that brings people together. Remy Zaugg worked ten years with a group of villagers in Burgundy. Joëlle Tuerlinckx has been working with a group of families in Cransac, a little town in south central France. If I’m not mistaken, she took an apartment in the center of town and lived there for a week each month to get to know the place and its people.
C: In 2013, you began initiating New Patrons in Nigeria. At the same time, cities like Lagos are lacking in viable civic infrastructures, and the existing amenities are further strained as the population continues to grow. Basic waterworks is not a reality for many there. How do you see New Patrons’ work in this context?
A: I think culture and self-determination are crucial to people everywhere in the world. Art is not about building infrastructure that the state does not provide. Your question implies that money should be better invested in something other than art. My answer is that we’re not going into places where there is no money at all – it’s just badly distributed to the extreme. There are NGO’s who spend lots of money on development projects that are absolutely pointless, even counter productive for the country’s self-emancipation. Lagos has a vital art market and wealthy local collectors, but it’s still lacking in cultural infrastructure. It makes a lot of sense for New Patrons to work there, or Cameroon, or post-revolutionary Tunisia. We find the money that is there or get support from abroad, and help distribute it through cultural channels to build self-organized cultural networks.
C: New Patrons was established in Europe, and is defined by a protocol. On the website, it currently says that part of the project is to “construct democracy”: an ideological framework. In the past, you’ve called New Patrons a “cultural technique.” Working in post-colonial nations in Africa, Asia, and particularly in India, how do you avoid allusions to colonial ambitions?
A: New Patrons is a network of independent mediators and organizations, it has no headquarter, no centre, and no general representation. In legal and in practical terms New Patrons is an open access artwork. Anybody can practice it. Starting initiatives in post-colonial countries basically means that I share experiences we have made in Europe with the New Patrons protocol, the conceptual blue print for cultural commissions by citizens. Wherever I go, there are two main things that I keep in mind. One is I always remind myself that I have no idea where I am. Even if I research these places extensively, that is no match to the knowledge of their residents. Also, I’m not bringing any money, and in no way am I telling people what to do. I share my experiences, and it happens that local communities who already have similar initiatives want to become part of the New Patrons network for support. I’m happy to give that support. Much of my work includes meeting and advising people in different countries who want to start local New Patrons initiatives.
C: As an artwork, New Patrons really makes that conceptual jump from site-specific to context-specific art. You guys have produced more than 400 projects to date. India and southeast Asia represents your most recent areas of interest. New Patrons is about giving voice of expression to groups who have been traditionally ignored. India strikes me as a particularly interesting place for New Patrons, as the caste system still very much in place guarantees that segments of society are systematically silenced.
A: Exactly. The New Patrons mediator sees everyone as a potential commissioner of contemporary art, and sees art as a way to develop something that would constitute some kind of change. Even just asking someone what he or she would want to commemorate, what their vision of the future is, or what symbols are significant to them, that is already empowering. It’s always a personal dialog to start with. In this way, we put a lot of trust in our mediators to listen to people, and not to push their own agendas. Together with the Goethe Institute, we’re excited to be launching New Patrons in Delhi this year.