Kommentar von Vladan Šír
Kommentar von Vladan Šír
In the fall two years ago, the Erste Bank threw a party in Vienna with a curious guest list and location. The featured venue was Vienna's prominent exhibition space Secession, where the bank's executives and corporate big shots mixed with culturati from around the Central and Eastern European region. But the most unusual thing about the whole party was the occasion: the conception of tranzit, the bank's new “initiative in the field of contemporary art and theory”.
Erste's decision to get involved in and support contemporary art came at a time when the American philanthropist George Soros started pulling his money out of both contemporary art and the region — a decade after he had formed the highly influential network of Soros Center for Contemporary Arts. This network had become one of the main sources of funding for artists, exhibitions and other art events in Central Europe. This was also the first time that a corporation was committed to supporting an entire organization, rather than just a single exhibition or art project. Thus the arrival of another big player like Erste Bank on the art scene was followed with great interest throughout the region.
But the newcomer was to introduce a whole new concept of organization and its own presentation, which some in the art scenes had never come across, others had doubts.
Since its formation in 2002, tranzit has been presided over by an international board composed of a mixed bag of contemporary art theorists, curators, artists — and corporate executives. “One of the principles on which tranzit works is that heads of departments and people from the bank are a part of our board,” says Vít Havránek, tranzit project leader in the Czech Republic.
This tight link to a corporation raises eyebrows of independent-minded artists and theorists. “Big money has the tendency to control things,” says Czech artist Martin Zet, who often works with the theme of power and systems of control. “I do like what Vít Havránek is doing, thank God for that. Any money coming to culture is good. It all boils down to the people running the organization, though.
But Havránek says the marriage is working out. “One of the things that I had to learn was communication,” he explains. “In the art scene, you explain a thing and you presume that everybody understands what we're after, because you talk to people who live within culture and know how it works. It's not that people in the bank wouldn't know anything about it, but their view of culture is defined by a broader framework: what is the meaning of such an activity for society? So when talking to people there, I first need to define for myself answers to the question about the meaning contemporary art has for society.”
Havránek and Boris Ondreička from tranzit's Slovak branch are gaining crucial skills that were greatly lacking in the art scene in the 1990s. They are reaching out beyond the closed confines of the contemporary art circles and trying to communicate with the outside world. “Our communication is intensive, and fortunately it isn't such that we would resist corporate influences, we went through that in the 1990s,” Havránek elaborates. “We're trying to create, in a different environment, respect and vindicate a feeling for a rather specific type of activity, which is what contemporary art is. We're not trying to strip away its aberration, conceptuality, poetry and radicalism by making compromises, but to create an environment that will honor these activities.”
Also, Erste's executives, by being directly involved in tranzit's organization, have pledged long-term commitment to supporting contemporary art in the region. However, despite being backed by a big corporation, tranzit thinks small — its goal is to support individual artists by giving out grants and to produce small-scale exhibitions rather than large, expensive shows.
In contrast to the public-oriented Soros centers, tranzit has a more private structure. There is no application process for grants with specific criteria for projects that artists have to meet. Tranzit addresses theorists, artists and writers involved with the art scene who then offer their suggestions of who the grantees could be.
Still, having a big bank behind it, tranzit inspired the hope in the contemporary art community that it would replace the Soros network. But these hopes soon vanished. “It’s important what tranzit is doing,” says Jiří Ptáček, editor-in-chief of the progressive art magazine Umělec. “But it's got quite a narrow focus for all that’s happening in the arts. And that's OK, except that there should be many more such organizations. Tranzit is little heard of, which is strange, as the bank has sufficient means to carry out stronger PR. The community knows about tranzit, but their PR should transcend the community. Their work is very important, but it is academic.”
Tranzit's Czech branch has so far cooperated with over a dozen artists living and working in the Czech Republic. The most visible projects include cooperation with Vienna's museum in progress. It consisted of publishing full-page art projects in the Czech political weekly Respekt and Austria's Der Standard. However, it is not media coverage that tranzit seeks. “tranzit has not been primarily set up to fill newspaper cultural sections. The basis of its activity lies in individuals and groups that create contemporary culture,” Havránek explains.