In January 2011 I started a project called Zolder Museum and became a self-employed director of my own museum of contemporary art in Amsterdam. Prior to starting the project I wrote the following text to clarify my position as an artist within the art community.
COMM UNITY
Art can make a tremendous effect on community and cause change, or simply change the regular course of communal life (which is already a lot) and this can happen only if the ones who deliver, artists, have the needed sensitivity for creating such affects.
To understand the complexity of multi-layered term community I have to zoom in and talk about responsibility, which I feel as an artist who is a part of the society and who doesn’t want to be marginalized by any of the systems (personal, social or art systems). I have strong sense of responsibility first of all to the truth; Truth is hard because of the world we live in, which is based on illusion, illusion of illusion, and illusion of illusion of illusion (note that I do not feel this to be only social influence of the media and the filthy rich but I truly believe that each and every one of us is responsible for the life he or she lives regardless of the circumstances he or she is born into; there is no one to blame but yourself!). As a result of this, truth always seems to be a little further away than it actually is. The role of an artist is to scratch the way out of this situation, assuming one wants to get out, of course.
Secondly, I am responsible to art-to my art work. I want to deliver truth (for and to myself) I am not interested in creating yet another layer of illusion, a falsification of reality, but to strip down whatever is blurring my sight. I do not wish to be yet another colonialist living from bloody necrophilia and call it art. I do not want to be a multi- culture’s bitch.
Thirdly: I feel responsible to live from my art and of my art, to live in the community as an artist and to have my social role clearly defined: an artist, the one who makes art based on the (hierarchical) system which roles from top to the bottom in the following order: truth-art-society. Hierarchy is not bad when the priorities are set right.
Sense of community (I prefer to call it a sense of community rather than community because it is something one senses and feels rather than one sees) can be reached through re questioning feelings of responsibility one has as a human being towards other human beings one interacts with through out his or hers life. Tools for life in a positive community (if there were such a thing as a positive community) are understanding, respect and love growing on good economic soil. We can all start with taking responsibility for our own actions and refusing to take sleeping pills whenever we feel we are starting to wake up.