Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #13

Fail Better: SMBA (1993–2016) and the Limits of Institutional Critique

by Jelle Bouwhuis

March 5, 2024

Abstract

Some readers might recall an earlier precursor in the experimental space in the form of the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA), an experimental space for artists on Rozenstraat that existed from 1993 to 2016. My association with it started in 2000, when I was appointed as press officer for the Stedelijk Museum, as curator of its Public Program (2004–2006), and finally as curator and director of SMBA from 2006 until its end in 2016.

In its ambitions against the reality of neoliberal culture, and its subsequent failure and closure, SMBA is an example of the space operating both as part of and counter to the museum itself. It inherited a partisan identity from the Stedelijk’s postwar image, set by its most compelling director ever, Willem Sandberg. In the programming line of SMBA pertaining to postcolonialism, this partisan identity turned into a form of institutional critique addressing the museum directly. This might be termed an effort in “museum-ing,” the editorial catchword of this issue of Stedelijk Studies.

Yet, in reflecting on my own experiences at the Stedelijk, subjective by default but hopefully instructive as well, I must ultimately evaluate this idea of museum-ing as a proposal to abolish the concept of the modern art museum altogether.

Many may not realize, but the Stedelijk Museum, while becoming a dedicated museum of modern and contemporary art after the Second World War, also thrived on a partisan image. Before 1945, the Stedelijk was a somewhat unspecified amalgam of wholly different collections that included a clock and a pharmacist collection, the Museum of Asian Art, and a number of period rooms. In 1930 it obtained a long-term loan of works by Van Gogh that later formed the basis of the current Van Gogh Museum (as of 1973). In the years around that seminal art moment, and up and until 1944, almost half of the museum’s annual programming was determined by the abundant number of artist associations that were active in Amsterdam. They staged contemporaneous work by their members in exhibitions that were accompanied by a price list. Some of the associations would organize overviews of topical art from artists from other countries, including Germany, Belgium, and France, as well as Russia. Their members were also active in ad hoc collectives that organized exhibitions, such as the Socialist Art Circle, responsible for the remarkable exhibition Socialist Art Now in 1930. Programming at the Stedelijk was predominantly a bottom-up and rather democratic affair, that is, insofar that artists and designers represented a variety of views and opinions, including political ones, but also class divisions and—among many on the left—working-class solidarity. Some of them sided with the ideals and tools of the revolution of the working class, creating a partisan image of themselves as anti-fascists, anti-racists, and anti-colonialists, especially in the years directly after the Nazis took power in Germany. Such artists include Nola Hatterman (1899–1984) and Harmen Meurs (1891–1964), but their activism came at the cost of being silenced and censored, partly instigated by the Stedelijk Museum’s directorship at the time.^[1] This all happened when Willem Sandberg’s star was rising at the Stedelijk as a freelance curator, to ultimately become the museum’s director in 1945.

The transition from the artists associations’ form of power sharing and exposing the political struggles at the center of the Stedelijk to a singular curatorial vision is strongly indebted to Willem Sandberg (1897–1984). As I will discuss, Sandberg managed to thrive on his partisan image, in contrast to the politically salient artists of his generation who mostly ended up in oblivion. This partisan image was subsequently transferred to the image of the museum in general. In this article, I go back to this fundamental history of the Stedelijk and trace its residue up to Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA). The question I want to raise is: Can we regard the position of SMBA as a form of institutional critique vis-à-vis the Stedelijk? And if so, what are the limitations and lessons we can learn from this? I do so from the positionality of my past tenure at the museum, albeit with a distance of several years and through the prism of my PhD research in the meantime. “Museum-ing” seems to imply a form of maximum institutional criticality, which theoretically the SMBA conjured but in practice played out very differently. In this essay, I take museum-ing as another opportunity for a critical assessment, even though the very term seems just another catchphrase of the museum’s rhetorical dictionary and in fact bears little meaning outside the small and privileged world of its own.

From Willem Sandberg to the SMBA

In the early 1930s Willem Sandberg gained a foothold in the Stedelijk, primarily on behalf of one of the abovementioned associations—one for designers—and soon became their ambitious spokesperson at the Museum. In 1938 he started his actual tenure as the museum’s curator (at the time, there was just one such position at the Stedelijk, besides the curator of the Asian Art Museum). It is often recalled that, while curator, he had the brick walls in the main hall of the museum painted white all over, a physical manifestation of his alignment with the quintessential modernist white cube that in fact was a belated endorsement of the museum reform movement of the 1920s in Germany.

It was during the German occupation of the Netherlands that Sandberg earned the image of a partisan, not because of his taste for the artistic modernism that was rejected under the National Socialist regime, but because of his activities as a resistance figure. In April 1943 he helped prepare an attack on the Public Records Office, with the aim of setting fire to the central population registry, which would prevent the conscription of men for the German workforce, or worse, identify Jews for deportation. The arson mostly failed, but Sandberg nevertheless had to go undercover in the countryside to avoid prosecution. He was the sole survivor among the main instigators of the attack; his fellow combatants were caught and executed.

When Sandberg was appointed director of the Stedelijk in 1945, he was enshrined as a resistance hero and managed to project this partisan image onto the museum. He criticized the artist associations that had continued doing business at the Stedelijk under occupation and he denounced the traditionalism of its artists, now largely regarded as collaborators with a pernicious regime. Instead, he promoted the work of the international modernist avant-garde that had been suppressed by National Socialism and shrewdly used the artist associations as the scapegoat for endowing this and the museum’s image with an aura of progressiveness. Sandberg helped the Dutch to imagine their own resistance to the evils of the war, and through the museum created a national partisan identity that in reality had mostly been absent.

Fulminating against the local artist associations that maintained a prominent yet diminishing visibility in the museum long remained an important lever in this policy.^[2] He put the work of European expressionists, cubists, and constructivists in a framework of a younger generation contemporaneously expanding on their groundwork. Of these, the artists of the CoBrA group are most renowned, and Karel Appel in particular was an artist in which Sandberg, and the Stedelijk Museum, invested throughout the artist’s career. Sandberg managed to project his partisan image on such contemporary artists. Appel’s expressionism, for instance, his now canonical Scream of Freedom (1949), was almost half a century later still considered “…an explosion, that stood for the liberation of our culture. And it was Sandberg who offered the Stedelijk as the stage where [such a] spark flew internationally after the liberation [from German occupation].”^[3]

This is typical of how Sandberg’s directorship was and still is esteemed as thoroughly out of the ordinary and innovative, liberatory, and perhaps in one word indeed partisan—the perfect merger of personal biography and museum direction toward the hallmarks of political and social liberation. But this moment of seeming cohesion also entailed the fashioning of a colonially imbued institutional primitivism, notably through exploiting artists such as Appel to the bone.^[4] It also meant the implementation of curatorial authority, which since then in the Netherlands has become known as “artistic directorship.” Sandberg’s self-propaganda as a visionary creator, and by extension that of a visionary museum, still dominates his and the Stedelijk’s legacy and historiography.^[5] The single-person authority, notably quite a paternalistic one, came at the expense of the political polyvocality that surfaced among the artist associations and their mixed-gendered committees.^[6]

I would not recall Sandberg in this way if I had not myself been thoroughly immersed in the Stedelijk Museum and its normalized partisan self-image. At the museum, one is quickly reminded of him, if only because of the two prominent murals by Karel Appel that are permanently on view, monitoring us from the past. One is situated in the entrance gallery, formerly the space in which, from 1955 until 2005, the museum restaurant was located (and before that, the Asian Art Museum); the other in the much smaller space that before 1955 functioned as a takeout bar, now known as the Appel Bar, situated along one of the entrances of the gallery dedicated to the new Buro Stedelijk (as of May 2023).

Sandberg’s main legacy at the Stedelijk is the passionate attachment to the idea of an artistic directorship bound to the projection that the modern art museum is ahead of its time, radical, innovative, and progressive. This partisan narrative has also completely pushed away the memory of the collectives of the artist associations who long managed to claim presence at the Stedelijk, just because the museum was and still is an entity of the municipality (though half-privatized in 2006). Whatever remained of the associations was finally ousted from the museum as late as 1993.

The same year also saw the foundation of SMBA. The prehistory of this Stedelijk branch has been described extensively, and is usually connected to the closure of Museum Fodor. Museum Fodor was a department of the Stedelijk dedicated to Amsterdam-based artists, but in 1992 its municipal funding was suddenly withdrawn in favor of a design museum in its place (ultimately, the Foam Photography Museum).^[7] I prefer to connect the foundation of SMBA not to the Fodor demise, but with the ousting of the artist associations. These had since 1945 been an important parochial device in countering their conceived traditionalism with the museum’s supposed progressive art policy. Against the definition of progress set out by Sandberg as internationalism or, formally, as investing in the newest art trends, the work presented by the artist associations was provincial by default.^[8] When the Stedelijk finally got rid of this tool of self-positioning, its partisan image also vanished due to the lack of this internal counter-position. In terms of international image-building, the museum now faced competition with the brisk neoliberal art world beyond Amsterdam, epitomized by spectacularizing the modern art museum, such as the Guggenheim Bilbao or the plans for Tate Modern in London, on the one hand, and on the other the globally dispersing contemporary art biennials and their jet-setting curators.^[9] The Stedelijk hardly caught up with these tokens of novelty and cool after 1993.

The smallish SMBA profited. It took its clues from new discursive strategies as showcased by upcoming institutions such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York or, closer to home, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (now Melly) in Rotterdam; it organized exhibitions with reliance on an increasing reservoir of international artists whose career went beyond the Netherlands, thanks to newly formatted local academies and residential institutions such as the Rijksakademie (Royal Academy), and placed emphasis on recent artistic output, including neo-conceptualism and research-based art.^[10] This contrasted with the Stedelijk that awaited a long-wished-for renovation and expansion of its premises to give it new impetus, like so many of its compeers elsewhere. Against this inert and weary impression, SMBA became an outlet for its partisan image.

Between Institutional Critique and Critique of Institutions

The impasse at the Stedelijk Museum reached a breakthrough in 2004 when it moved temporarily to the former postal distribution center not far from Amsterdam Central Station, where the headquarters of Booking.com is located today. In this temporary venue, branded as Stedelijk Museum CS, I was appointed curator of public programming while still running the press office. Public programming was seen as an important tool for revitalizing the museum and getting rid of its impression of passivity—we could term it “museum-ing.” One of the many guests in this period was artist and cultural theorist Andrea Fraser.^[11] Fraser’s work and writings stand paramount in recent discussions of institutional critique, whether these arrive from recent calls to decolonize museums or from aspiring curators who take the subject on for an (im)possible museum exhibition.^[12] When Fraser made her appearance in the temporary Stedelijk, in September 2005, she had just published a seminal essay in ArtForum magazine, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique.”^[13] Institutional critique, she wrote, is often used as a shorthand to describe “art that exposes ‘the structures and logic of museums and art galleries.’”^[14] But, Fraser continues, we find ourselves in a situation that museums are fully endorsing institutional critique, inviting the artists historically associated with it, for seminal and spectacular exhibitions.^[15] And, as a matter of fact, she writes, “Institutional critique has always been institutionalized. It could only have emerged within and, like all art, can only function within the institution [of] art.”^[16]

Figure 1. Andrea Fraser, in discussion with Sven Lütticken, SMCS on 11, September 8, 2005. Photo: Jelle Bouwhuis.

Fraser’s explanation of institutional critique matches with my observations on the partisan role of SMBA and the reciprocity in its relation to the museum. After all, SMBA was a department of the Stedelijk, albeit with a space of its own and a separate stream of funding from the municipality. Its three successive SMBA curators, Leontine Coelewij, Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen, and myself, were all appointed by the director of the Stedelijk.^[17] On the other hand, the SMBA program developed independently. SMBA secured a position as an alternative for the large museum, whereas the latter could continue to point to SMBA as its contemporary “laboratory.” But this difference evened out when the Stedelijk moved to its temporary location, if only because the premises was not conditioned for art in a classic sense. This predicament enforced a reliance on contemporary art, like SMBA, and eventually a dynamic public program.

SMBA’s partisan role got blurred. When I became curator/director of SMBA in 2006, while still supervising public programming at Stedelijk Museum CS, I did not directly have a solution for that impasse. My first concern was to cope with curatorial and institutional competition in Amsterdam. Being a curator of SMBA around 2006 meant finding a position in a critical field beyond the museum. This positioning and visibility of critical curatorship emerged with the globally expanding phenomenon of the art biennials. So far, SMBA had been drawing from the expanding international networks available in Amsterdam and the relations that were established outside of Europe. My very first exhibition as SMBA curator was a solo show of Roma Pas, not dealing with her possible identification as Black, but rather prioritizing her sense of alienation during a residency in Xiamen, China. The second exhibition was a solo show by Hala Elkoussy, whose work critiques the neoliberalism and urban sprawl in Cairo under politically repressive circumstances.

Figure 2. Renzo Martens, Enjoy Poverty, remade neon sign from Episode 3 roaming an Amsterdam canal around the premiere of the film, November 2008. Photo: Jelle Bouwhuis.

Retrospectively, while my program employed Amsterdam-related artists, almost every second exhibition was steeped in criticality, addressing topics such as global neoliberalism, libidinal capitalism, gentrification, and (neo)colonialism, and this surged after the debt crisis in 2008. An apotheosis was the half documentary, half feature film Episode 3 – Enjoy Poverty by Renzo Martens that premiered in SMBA at the end of 2008. This film, self-shot using a Handycam, features Martens himself as the main protagonist, acting as a White Savior in devastated areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, he explains to the impoverished population of plantation workers that they should cherish and nourish their poverty as the most precious resource they own. As I wrote at the time, Martens “holds up a mirror to Western development aid and the Western viewer in particular, in which the moral dilemmas of our time are mercilessly delineated.”^[18] The work sparked a tremendous flow of responses, not only in (Dutch) media but also in the form of art criticism and polemic, as well as numerous academic elaborations.^[19]

The Postcolonial as Project

Martens’s work was like a slap to my face, highlighting what the late art curator and historian Okwui Enwezor dubbed the Postcolonial Constellation.^[20] Whereas colonialism has ended, Enwezor argued, dichotomous unbalances such as Black-White, North-South, Developed-Undeveloped still exist. He himself consequently referenced and potentialized these inequalities in exhibitions such as documenta 11 (2002), to come to terms with the contradictory shine of global capitalism against geopolitical discontents, in praise of postcolonial critique and the politics of multiculturalism.^[21]

A focus on postcolonialism became central in SMBA’s programming. It started with a research program called Africa Reflected (2009), in direct response to Martens’s film. This developed into the three-year Project 1975 (2010–2012) and culminated in Global Collaborations (2013–2016).^[22] Such a dedicated direction was surely missing in the Stedelijk’s program, if only because of its struggles with its housing situation, at least until the museum finally reopened in the fall of 2012.^[23]

From 2009 onward, SMBA had carved for itself a solid curational niche that felt urgent and topical, and comfortably distanced from its parent museum. It should be noted here, again, that this went on under auspices of the Stedelijk Museum’s directorship. Especially Ann Goldstein, director from 2010 to 2013, fully endorsed SMBA’s projects. Before she announced her leave, she had signed major funding applications for Global Collaborations that assured the continuation of SMBA’s program at its own venue as well as inside the Stedelijk Museum. The core of this program was to foster collaborative curatorial practices that defied the kind of exploitative and authoritarian approach pressingly demonstrated by Renzo Martens. Today the central thematical reference point of (neo)colonial reciprocity might appear as already worn, but at the time SMBA made a welcoming difference with it, that is, in the wider field of mainstream contemporary art institutions.^[24]

In the Belly of the Beast

It went wrong when the project arrived at the Stedelijk itself and under another directorship. The first explicit omen was the case of Bernard Akoi-Jackson. Akoi-Jackson is an artist from Ghana who had participated in Project 1975. In a follow-up as part of Global Collaborations, Akoi-Jackson was committed to the young adult peer group of the museum (Blikopeners) during a residency period in the spring of 2014. This resulted in a series of staged photographs in which the artist appears as a humorously overdressed “global” character of sorts. Akoi-Jackson called these works [G]local[o]cations, hinting at the “bluff of globalization,” both compliant with and critical of any art project under the banner of globalization.^[25] The works were meant to be put outdoors, and after some deliberation, Akoi-Jackson envisaged them in the empty sculpture niches at the first-floor level on the Stedelijk’s outer facade, granting his work the utmost public visibility. A cherry picker was ordered to hoist the monumental photographic works to their designated spots. They would thus be shown in the same period as the exhibition that I curated, How Far How Near – The World at the Stedelijk, based on the museum collection and named after a recently acquired work by Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, also from Ghana, in 2013. Akoi-Jackson’s was a welcome addition to other commissioned pieces for this show.^[26]

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Figure 3–11. Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Untitled: [G]local[o]cations, photographic series and (planned) outdoor installation, Stedelijk Museum (August 2014). Images courtesy of Bernard Akoi-Jackson.

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Figures 12–14. Exhibition views of How Far How Near, The World at the Stedelijk (2014). Photos by Gert Jan van Rooij. Pictured are works by Dorothy Amenuke, Abdoulaye Konaté, Jacques Lipchitz, and Vincent Vulsma. Installation of posters from the Stedelijk collection. Pictured are works by Godfried Donkor (wallpaper), Michael Tedja, and Alfredo Jaar.

Right before the opening, however, it became clear that anything pertaining Africa at the Stedelijk became entangled in what Ole Oguibe has coined “the culture game”: “For those who come from backgrounds outside Europe… the arena of mainstream cultural practice in the West is a doubly predictable space—first, because it is a game space and you have to know the rules of the game, and second, because such aspirants have a limited chance of success because it is predetermined that they should fail.”^[27] Voices of dissent within the museum circulated around Akoi-Jackson’s staged photography, condemning it as “folkloric” and even “politically correct,” a term usually mobilized against multiculturalism in the 1990s.^[28] The new directorship complied, and two days before the works would be mounted on the facade, the cherry picker was called off.^[29]

The opening of the How Far How Near exhibition was accompanied by a commissioned theatrical play by Quinsy Gario. Gario helped launch the Black Pete is Racism movement in the Netherlands, following a performance with that title in 2011. The movement opposes the Black Pete figure in traditional Dutch celebrations of Saint Nicholas. By 2014, the movement had gained international attention and national traction. Gario became a publicly contested figure who was particularly exposed to malicious political commentary from the political far right and social media threats. Before that, he had already participated in a group exhibition at SMBA.^[30] Inside the Stedelijk, however, Gario was mainly regarded as a menace. Yet a cancellation of his work, like Akoi-Jackson, would have made a very bad public impression. Regardless, the performance, entitled A Village called Gario, was not an anti-racism manifestation of sorts. It was staged twice at the Stedelijk on the evening of September 18, the first performance in a packed auditorium and the second with a much smaller audience, a fact that was reviewed in populist press.^[31] Four days later, the right-wing Party for Freedom (PVV), which had opportunistically maneuvered itself in support of the Black Pete tradition, dropped tendentious questions in the Dutch parliament about the funding of this performance.^[32] The partisan role of SMBA had finally entered national politics! The Stedelijk Museum, however, remained stunningly silent on this demonstration of disrespect for a Black person within its own premises—just one month after the Ferguson uprising. Only in the wake of the massive protests after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 did the Stedelijk feel obliged to make a public statement against racism in general, and only so in the slipstream of larger museums like Tate and MoMA.^[33]

The Cancelation of SMBA

At that time, I considered the respective censorship and substandard response of the museum as typical institutional accidents. I had experienced straightforward censorship at the Stedelijk before, in 2009.^[34] But this time it surfaced as a consequence of collegial differences of opinion. Or was it a matter of negating and even silencing the ambit of Global Collaborations, namely its relational approach and structural polyvocality? Soon the Stedelijk directorship expressed the wish to cancel SMBA altogether. Initially, this wish remained unjustified. Only when the decision of closure met with more discontent than expected was it strangely packaged as an intention to research the possibility of a “new SMBA.”^[35]

In response, art magazine Kunstlicht organized a public debate in the closing month to confront the museum’s management with its contradictory and counterproductive intention.^[36] But the discontent with the Stedelijk also diverged into activism against its institutional racism, born out of the previous acts of cancelation and neglect. This activism was channeled through the exhibition Bell Invites (2016), the penultimate exhibition in SMBA before it closed its premises.

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Figures 15–21. Bell Invites, SMBA (2016). Installation views. Photos by Ernst van Deursen. Exhibition opening night. Photos by TARONA.

Richard Bell is an artist/activist siding with Aboriginal rights in Australia. He had shown his Aboriginal Tent Embassy on several occasions. At SMBA, this impromptu installation functioned as a platform for anti-racist activism. For the first time in its history, and the Stedelijk’s history, an all-Black exhibition was compiled featuring, among others, Emory Douglas, a graphic artist and the former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party, as well as Quinsy Gario and upcoming artist Brian Elstak and designer Farida Sedoc.^[37]

In the framework of Bell Invites a discursive time slot was reserved at the Stedelijk auditorium, announced neutrally as a “global performance,” to consider “multiple histories,” such as those “behind the diasporic communities that make a city such as Amsterdam already a ‘global’ location.”^[38] The umbrella term of the global had now made way for a straightforward address of institutional racism inside the belly of the beast.^[39] At this conjuncture it could easily be imagined that SMBA could have turned into a separatist Black art institution, similar to many of those established in the United States. Needless to say, at the time the museum failed to seize this opportunity of what could be a truly up-to-date gesture in its search for a “new SMBA.”^[40] It would have continued the institutional critical counterpart of the Stedelijk as its partisan “other,” marking the museum itself as essentially a White institution.

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Figures 22–25. Bell Invites: A Global Performance, featuring Akwasi, University of Color, Emory Douglas, Patricia Kaersenhout, and others, Stedelijk Museum, February 6, 2016. Photos by Ernst van Deursen.

A “Primary Site of Division”

The Museum did not go that far, but its recent compassion under the directorship of Rein Wolfs with the subjects that so far had been SMBA’s domain is nevertheless remarkable. These include a questioning of the museum’s colonialist entanglements, a policy for Diversity & Inclusion, addressing institutional racism, defiance of Eurocentrism, and a profound engagement with curators and artists who have attachments to the global South.^[41] If we take the Stedelijk’s program of recent years, we see an appropriation rather than a cancelation of SMBA, and it surely overarches the latter’s recent resurrection as Buro Stedelijk. As a matter of fact, it is hard to find a museum anywhere in the Netherlands not delving into these issues. They even seem to thrive on it.^[42]

But does that make them politically polyvocal and more democratic spaces? Or, putting it differently, is the desire of a modern art museum such as the Stedelijk—in fact echoing Sandberg’s rhetoric of the 1950s—to engage in “museum-ing” and to advocate societal change indeed the vehicle to make such come true? To put it more critically, does its demand for change produce change, or does it merely produce rhetorical ammunition for the powers that be?

To flesh out this question, I return to Andrea Fraser. In an evaluation of the presidential electoral victory of Donald Trump in 2016, she signals asymmetrical class alliances. She projects critical social theory on the art world, which she sees as a field in which both cultural capital and financial wealth is concentrated. Museums might arguably have been investing in areas of more diverse representation, but they nevertheless have remained “repositories of wealth and power” and a “primary site of the division between economic and other forms of social and cultural domination.”^[43] Outsiders identify the language of progressive cultural politics mainly with the power on the museum boards. Elaborating on the cultural theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Fraser contends that “while artists, intellectuals, and other dominated fractions of the dominant class may believe that they are engaged in emancipatory and egalitarian struggles, the most culturally dominated members of society may see these struggles for what they often are: competition for power among the powerful from which they are excluded.” Andrea Fraser’s findings are backed by social theorist Nancy Fraser (no relative), who likewise contends that foregrounding an emancipatory struggle has become the domain of the already privileged: “Focused on ‘leaning in’ and ‘cracking the glass ceiling,’ its principal beneficiaries could only be those already in possession of the requisite social, cultural, and economic capital. Everyone else would be stuck in the basement.”^[44]

Both their conclusions are a lesson for the situation in the Netherlands, where the perceived estrangement of the “cosmopolitan elites” from the “common people” is successfully exploited in right-wing politics and the PVV, which at the time of writing this essay has occupied a quarter of the seats in the Dutch parliament.

Conclusion: Abolish the Modern Art Museum!

In this article I have come a long way, from the Stedelijk as democratic platform for the representation of the politically and socio-economically diverse class of artists, to its current state of conflation of divergent and often not clearly expressed interests. As the editors, through the voice of Kitty Zijlmans, express in the preamble of this issue of Stedelijk Studies, the focus should not be on what museums are, but on what they can do.^[45] Of course we should all commit to this, but can we indeed, when we realize what the museum is? The modern art museum is foremost a very static motor of accumulation. The Stedelijk Museum, although not even excessive in this respect, is a repository of 140,000 or so objects. No more than 1% is annually on view.^[46] As a matter of fact, the bulk of it will lie eternally dormant in storage rooms, blocked from view yet burdening the institution with a formidable asset. The prospect of having more of the collection on display is commonly positioned by museums as leverage for expansion plans, although the percentage of visibility never increases because accumulation does not cease. And even then, being on view is not a guarantee toward comprehending such a massive number of objects (including lengthy textual pieces, film and video works, and performances). Collections keep growing. Measures of diversity, inclusion, and equal representation of male and female artists only fuel the accumulation pyre.^[47] Repairing imbalances through deaccessioning exists but remains a marginal affair that does not reduce museum possessions—to the contrary.^[48]

There is no limit and no remedy to museum accumulation. It hijacks the future and confronts every next generation with even a greater burden. The challenge of future generations will not be museum-ing, but de-museum-ing. Because, how can this incessant accumulation support social justice, equality, or democracy? Accumulation is the archenemy of decolonization. It creates a professional-managerial class with its own hierarchies and divisions, and a relentless quest for capital. It enforces infinite pressure on common resources. Every museum expansion, certainly in cities such as Amsterdam, promotes excessive tourism and gentrification. Every acquisition for the collection is a challenge for climate sustainability, urban livability, and affordable housing. The larger the museum, the higher its stakes, the more intrusive its marketing. In capitalizing on a (watered-down) partisan image of progress, now also exploiting cultural diversity and gender equality, modern art museums stand out for “extracting our aesthetic attention and resources” by incorporating these at the expense of the underprivileged.^[49]

With regard to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which stands atop of the ladder of accumulation of art and real estate capital, a strategy has been tested to mentally marginalize it. This took place under the banner of Strike MoMA, with its call for no less than “to imagine and enact the dismantling of MoMA with a diversity of tactics and visions”; in other words, the abolishment of the museum.^[50] Such voices make apparent that museums, as places of accumulation, capitalism, and “aesthetic attraction” in the name of the common people are considered as standing in the way of social justice rather than doing anything of virtue to further it. Strike MoMA dwelled in the realm of activism, but its abolitionist sentiments are gaining ground in art theory as well. In a recent essay, Nina Möntmann voices a similar opinion against modern art museums for their “capitalist basis of colonial constellations”, i.e., their dependence on capital, their repetitive acts of censorship, and the resulting suspectable diversity policies.^[51] Instead, Möntmann makes a case for small art spaces and even “informal infrastructures”—perhaps the Amsterdam artists associations of the past would also qualify—that are pioneering decoloniality and decentering.^[52] They might fail, but, in the grain of Möntmann’s arguments, they are not here to stay forever and hamper future generations with their accumulated burdens.

Any countermovement is unlikely to be formed from within the museum. The days of the productiveness of institutional critique are gone indeed. Perhaps we should go back to the time that the Stedelijk was merely a platform where collectives of artists reigned supreme. They failed, but at least they did so commonly. They failed better.

About the Author

Jelle Bouwhuis is an art historian. He works as a curator of Modern Art at Museum Arnhem, the Netherlands. He also pursues a PhD degree at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam with his research into Modern Art Museums in the Perspective of Globalization, Multiculturalism and Coloniality (due 2024).

Formerly he was curator and the managing director of Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2006-2016) and artistic supervisor of the SMBA’s and the Stedelijk Museum’s joint Global Collaborations project (2013-2016). His publications include books such as: Art in the Third Reich – Seduction and Distraction (W-Books 2023), co-edited with Almar Seinen; Project 1975 – Contemporary Art and the Post-Colonial Unconscious (Blackdog Publishers 2014), co-edited with Kerstin Winking; Monumentalism. History and National Identity in Contemporary Art (NAi Publishers 2010), co-edited with Margriet Schavemaker.

Some of his recent articles are: ‘Decolonize Art History, Decolonize Art Museums!’, Museological Review, 23 (2019), 37-45, and ‘Modern Calls, Mental Walls. Willem Sandberg in Amsterdam and Israel’, in The Mediterranean: A Sea of Conflicting Spiritualities, G. Schembri Bonaci & N. Petroni (eds.), Malta 2017, 35-52.

[1] For many, being an artist as such exemplified the success of working-class emancipation under thriving socialism. Their actual position among the class struggle and party affiliation was subject to continuous debate, see, among others, Marie-José Buck, ed., Links Richten: Tussen partij en arbeidersstrijd – Materiaal voor een theorie over de literatuur en arbeidersstrijd [2 volumes] (Nijmegen: Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1975); Hans Mulder, Kunst in crisis en bezetting (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1978); Frank Gribling, “‘Tendenzkunst’: De politisering van Nederlandse kunstenaars tussen de twee wereldoorlogen,” in Berlijn-Amsterdam 1920–1940: Wisselwerkingen, eds. Kathinka Dittrich, Paul Blom, and Flip Bool (Amsterdam: Querido, 1982), 324–331. In English, see Susan Veldmeijer, “Considering art: The role of De Brug, the ASB and the Socialistische Kunstenaarskring in the production, distribution and reception of notions on art and the position of the artist” (doctoral thesis, Utrecht University, 2014). The position of Meurs is also discussed in this literature.

[2] Claar van Kroonenburg-de Koudemaeker and Annelies Haase, “De Rol van Sandberg,” in De doorbraak van de moderne kunst in Nederland, de jaren 1945–51, ed. Willemijn Stokvis (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff/Landshoff, 1984), 63–92; Peter Rorink, “Sandberg – tussen Stedelijk en Stadhuis,” Kunst en Beleid in Nederland 4 (Amsterdam: Boekmanstichting/Van Gennip, 1990): 127–156; John Jansen van Galen and Huib Schreurs, Het huis van nu, waar de toekomst is: Een kleine historie van het Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1895–1995 (Amsterdam: V+K Publishing, 1995), 135–138.

[3] Filmmaker and journalist Jan Vrijman, looking back at the postwar years in the mid-1990s, quoted in Jansen van Galen and Schreurs, Het huis van nu, waar de toekomst is, 99 (translation mine).

[4] Appel regularly emphasized his top position in a primitivist hierarchy, for instance when he wrote in 1947 “I am now making a powerful primitive work, more primitive than Negro art and Picasso”, in Graham Birtwistle, “Behind the Primitivism of Cobra,” exh.cat. Cobra: Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, ed. Peter Shield (London: Hayward Gallery, 2003), 20–29, 27. I elaborate this institutional primitivism in a chapter of my upcoming PhD dissertation. My earlier assessments include “What is a ‘Post-Colonial Exhibition’?,” Savvy Journal 4 (2013): 62–68; and “The Global Turn and the Stedelijk Museum,” in Changing Perspectives: Dealing with Globalisation in the Presentation and Collection of Contemporary Art, ed. Mariska ter Horst (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2012), 154–162.

[5] The main biography up until today is actually an autobiographical adaptation of a series of radio interviews with Sandberg, published in Ank Leeuw-Marcar, Willem Sandberg: Portret van een kunstenaar (Amsterdam: Meulenhof, 1981); Leeuw-Marcar, Willem Sandberg: Portrait of an artist (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2013).

[6] Arguably, the relative representation of women among the visual artists showing at the Stedelijk Museum around 1930 would not be reached again until ca. 1960.

[7] Rogier Schumacher, “From Fodor to SMBA: A Historical Perspective,” in 10 Years SMBA – We Show Art, ed. Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen (Amsterdam: Artimo, 2003), 679–704.

[8] Ibid., 680. Sandberg’s polarizing frames continue to dominate his historiography, which is probably the reason that Schumacher here calls him a “Marxist,” a claim that was never confirmed.

[9] For an impression of the global pressures on the museum in the 1990s, see Larissa Buchholz and Ulf Wuggenig, “Cultural Globalization between Myth and Reality: The Case of the Contemporary Visual Arts,” Art-e-fact 4 (2004). On the joint conflation of global curatorship and “biennialization,” see Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); and O’Neill, “The era of the nomadic curator god,” The Fortnightly Review, June 19, 2013. For an overview of the (nearly) global dispersion of biennials in the 1990s, see Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, eds., The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, exh. cat. (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2013), 100–107. The “global” challenge also alerted the Stedelijk Museum; see, for instance, Ria Lavrijsen, ed., Global encounters in the world of art: Collisions of tradition and modernity (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 1998).

[10] Van Nieuwenhuyzen, 10 Years SMBA: passim.

[11] Andrea Fraser, in discussion with Sven Lütticken, on the occasion of the publication of her book Museum Highlights (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), as part of the program SMCS on 11 at Stedelijk Museum CS, September 8, 2005.

[12] Respectively: MTL, “From institutional Critique to institutional Liberation? A Decolonial Perspective on the Crises of Contemporary Art,” October, no. 165 (Summer 2018): 192–227; Karen Archey, After Institutions (Berlin: Floating Opera Press, 2022). For earlier elaborations of institutional critique, see Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, Institutional Critique: An anthology of artists’ writings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

[13] Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” ArtForum (September 2005): 100–105.

[14] Ibid., 102. Fraser here quotes a leaflet for a symposium on this subject at the time, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

[15] In the Netherlands, among others, Hans Haacke – Viewing Matters: Upstairs (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1996).

[16] Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions,” 104; emphasis hers.

[17] Coelewij and Van Nieuwenhuizen were appointed by director Rudi Fuchs (1993–2002); myself by Gijs van Tuyl (2005–2009). Stedelijk Museum CS was realized under interim director Hans van Beers (2003–2004).

[18] See www.smba.nl/.

[19] A selection of international coverage over the years is listed on the artist’s own website; see https://renzomartens.com/. See also T. J. Demos, “Poverty Pornography, Humanitarianism, and Neo-liberal Globalization: Notes on some Paradoxes in Contemporary Art,” SMBA Newsletter, no. 121 (2011), www.smba.nl/.

[20] Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (2003): 57–82.

[21] This position is most clearly formulated in Okwui Enwezor, “Mega-exhibitions and the Antinomies of Transnational Form” (2004), in The Biennial Reader, eds. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (Bergen: Bergen Kunsthall, 2010), 427–425.

[22] These projects have relied on SMBA teamwork, with an important additional curatorial role by Kerstin Winking. For Project 1975, see http://project1975.smba.nl; Jelle Bouwhuis and Kerstin Winking, eds., Project 1975, Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Unconscious (Amsterdam/London: SMBA/blackdog publishing, 2014). The dedicated Global Collaborations project website, once integrated in the website of the Stedelijk Museum, has vanished. A sense of its intentions can be grasped through the first issue of Stedelijk Studies (2014); see https://stedelijkstudies.com/journal-archive/issue-1-collecting-geographies/.

[23] The period in which these projects by SMBA unfolded was covered by the successive Stedelijk Museum directorships of Gijs van Tuyl, an interim period of a year, Ann Goldstein (2010–2013), Patrick van Mil (business director, 2010–2012), Karin van Gilst (business director, 2013–2017), and Beatrix Ruf (artistic director, 2014–2017).

[24] Institutions such as IniVA in London operate in a similar niche.

[25] Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Waiting to “Shine Your Eye” [?]: The probability of Tangible Manifestation[s] of “Global” utopias deferred (unpublished essay, 2014). See also Svea Jürgenson, “Identity Is a Notoriously Contested Concept: Bernard Akoi-Jackson on Africa, Accra and Amsterdam,” MetropolisM, May 19, 2014, https://www.metropolism.com/.

[26] For these, see How Far How Near: The World at the Stedelijk, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2014), available via Academia.edu.

[27] Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 33.

[28] For a critique of the term’s datedness, see Lucy Lippard, “The More Things Change,” in Maura Reilly, Curatorial Activism: Towards and Ethics of Curating (London/New York: Thames & Hudson, 2018), 7–11: 7.

[29] For a more extensive elaboration of Akoi-Jackson’s work and this project in particular, including the artist’s own view of the matter, see Rhoda Woets, “‘Heated Discussions are Necessary’ – The Creative Engagement with Sankofa in Ghanaian Modern Art,” in Heritage Dynamics: Politics of Authentication, Aesthetics of Persuasion and the Cultural Production of the Real, eds. Birgit Meyer and Matthijs van de Port (London/ New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 212–235: 225–228. The commissioned photographic works still exist and are safely stored outside the Stedelijk.

[30] Quinsy Gario – Bart Groenendaal – Stefan Ruitenbeek, SMBA, April 15–June 3, 2012.

[31] Jan Dijkgraaf, “18 pijnlijke minuten performance art: Met Quinsy!,” GeenStijl, September 20, 2014. For a full video of the play, see https://www.youtube.com/.

[32] “Een nauwelijks bezocht showtje van een gesubsidieerde Zwarte-Piethater” (A hardly visited little show by a subsidized Black Pete hater), Parliamentary question, no. 2014Z16189 (September 22, 2014), www.openkamer.org/. In fact, the funding was funneled from a subsidy by the European Union in the framework of the four-year international research project MeLa – European Museums in an Age of Migrations, through intermediaries Paul Goodwin and Victoria Walsh.

[33] “Stedelijk committeert zich aan strijd tegen racisme,” June 11, 2020, see www.stedelijk.nl/.

[34] This was the instant removal of the Stedelijk-commissioned outdoor work Hybrid Style by Vincent Vulsma: a wallpaper pattern meshing a composition of contested Stedelijk-owned work by Kazimir Malevich with the logo of ABN AMRO Bank, which at the time was jeopardized by the debt crisis and reconsidering its sponsorship of the museum.

[35] “Research New Art Venue,” May 19, 2016, https://www.stedelijk.nl/en/news/research-new-art-venue.

[36] “Diversity, criticism, and the closure of SMBA,” June 14, 2016, live-streamed via online radio channel Jajajaneeneenee, archived on https://jajajaneeneenee.com/.

[37] Bell Invites, SMBA, January 30–March 19, 2016. Curated by Vivian Ziherl in collaboration with Aruna Vermeulen and University of Color.

[38] As announced on www.smba.nl/.

[39] In absence of Stedelijk leadership, two modern art museum directors stood heroically at the receiving end of the discontent: Charles Esche (Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven) and Catherine De Zegher (Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent). Among other participants were the up-and-coming artist Patricia Kaersenhout and acclaimed rapper and poet Akwasi.

[40] Around this time, two Black cultural institutions emerged elsewhere in Amsterdam: The Black Archives and Open Space Contemporary Art Museum (OSCAM).

[41] For reasons of brevity, I only refer to a recent documentary on the Stedelijk by Sarah Vos, White Balls on Walls (2022); see https://npo.nl/.

[42] The list of exhibitions and programs addressing Dutch colonialism and the Global South in Dutch museums is far too long to specify here. Current initiatives of diversity policy include the project Musea Bekennen Kleur (Museums Confess Color), with 30 actively participating museums, and the Cultural Diversity & Inclusion Code (https://codedi.nl), to which publicly funded museums must comply. Among modern art museums in the Netherlands, only the Van Abbe Museum can be termed a pioneer of such policies.

[43] Andrea Fraser, “Toward a Reflexive Resistance,” X-TRA online (2018): np; see https://www.x-traonline.org/.

[44] Nancy Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond,” American Affairs 1, no. 4 (2017): np; see https://americanaffairsjournal.org/.

[45] This focus should be understood in the light of ongoing critical museum studies since the late 1980s, up to recent itineraries such as Nora Sternfeld, Das radikaldemokratische Museum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018); and Robert R. Janes and Richard Sandell, eds., Museum Activism (London/New York: Routledge, 2019).

[46] This is my own and quite optimistic observation, which also includes all external loans annually. Before the abolishment of the Design Wing, under director Beatrix Ruf, the figure was presumably 2%.

[47] This is one of my takeaways from White Balls on Walls.

[48] Zachary Small, “These Two Museums Sold Art by White Men to Buy Work by Women and Artists of Color. Did It Actually Tip the Scales?,” Artnet News (December 15, 2022); see https://news.artnet.com/.

[49] Fred Moten, in Strike MoMA Working Group of IIAAF Presents: A Conversation with Sandy Grande, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Jasbir Puar, and Dylan Rodriguez, May 27, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/.

[50] Various authors, “Diversity of Tactics, Diversity of Aesthetics: Post-MoMA Futures, Part I’, Versobooks.com [blog], 30 April 2021, at http://www.versobooks.com/. Strike MoMA is an extension of Decolonize This Place, active since 2015, and includes the group MTL, active since the Occupy movement. See also MTL (2018).

[51] Nina Möntmann, Decentring the Museum: Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial Legacies (London: Lund Humphries, 2023); her characterization of the modern art museum can be found on page 10.

[52] Ibid., 107.