The Seduction of the Bureaucrat
De Garage, Mechelen (BE), 15 March — 4 June, 2023
Group exhibition and public program with guided tours, performances and a panel discussion in collaboration with the Hannah Arendt Institute
Participating artists: Apparatus 22, Jan Banning, Deborah Bowmann, AA Bronson, Tiago Duarte, Anna Bella Geiger, Sarah Hendrickx, LAb[au], Ariane Loze, Wesley Meuris, Vijai Patchineelam, Lieven Segers, Pilvi Takala, Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence, Axel van der Kraan, Herman Van Ingelgem, Philippe Van Wolputte, Vermeir & Heiremans
Graphic design/public mediation by Christophe Clarijs & Robin Vets
Review in Metropolis M magazine
The Seduction of the Bureaucrat is a project that sheds light on an unlikely relationship: that between art and bureaucracy. Creativity is not usually consistent with forms, procedures and protocols. The artist and the civil servant or manager, they are far apart, each in their own biotope: the studio and the office. Yet they can hardly do without each other. Every professional artist is busy with administration, and the cultural sector also benefits from sound, incisive policies.
Curator Pieter Vermeulen invites about 20 visual artists to ask how they look at bureaucracy and how they deal with it in their work. Does bureaucracy constrain creativity, or does mastery only show itself in limitation? Do Kafkaesque situations still occur in shadowy back rooms and dusty archives, or does today's office space look different? What is the impact of technology? What does Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" still mean in a current work ethic of quiet quitting, bore- and burnout? Is creativity still relevant in a country where even accounting is creative? And is it up to artists to woo bureaucrats, or to resist the temptation of bureaucracy itself?
The title of the exhibition is an allusion to a 1983 essay by artist AA Bronson, who describes the emergence of artists' initiatives in Canada as "the humiliation of the bureaucrat." Some 30 years later, however, he publishes another essay in which he expresses his disappointment with the institutionalization of these same initiatives and with the artists involved who have in turn become bureaucrats themselves. How do we reconcile institutional routine with charisma, and what role can artists play in this?