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Silke Wagner
Roland (1998), 100 wooden panels, 100 × 100 cm, © Neuer Berliner Kunstverein/Jens Ziehe, 2008, installation view (at Artothek n.b.k.)
While the members of the small independent and uncommercial initiatives
were rubbing hands with joy, their boundless enthusiasm
being fed by the need of a new institutional policy they were about
to benefit from in their turn, the skeptics aged to soon by the general
apathy of the art market, which expurgated the entire political
content, were predicting the failure of this change, seen only as a
new institutional formalism and which could never change anything
of the essence. However, the first actions of the n.b.k. were the only
able to calm things down. But let’s first notice that the n.b.k. shift
of generations and of orientation came in the context of the current
debate in Germany regarding the engagement of the civil society,
as well as on the function of the culture and the institutions it represents.
Given the conditions, a Kunstverein may play an important
role only if its spaces become effective possibilities of expression for
the community and its voluntary engagement, taking on an ideology
of common participation which aims at the public interest and
which, therefore, rejects the bourgeois-passive image of consuming
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