Painting Into A Corner: The Pedagogic Agenda, the Immersive Mediation (and the Overdetermined Experience) of ‘Play Van Abbe 4’

Abstract

Play Van Abbe 4: The Pilgrim, the Tourist, the Flâneur (and the Worker) (2011), the final installment of the experimental, Play Van Abbe program at the Van Abbemuseum – invited viewers to play one of four ‘roles’, each of which entailed a different mode of engagement. The pilgrim sought divine inspiration, the tourist an encounter with something unusual. The flâneur strolled along in passive observance while the worker, not merely a consumer of experience, produced in return. To engender these perspectives role-specific ‘tools’ for art mediation were extended to the exhibition’s visitors. While not explicitly fetishized on pedestals or in vitrines, mediation was the overriding object and subject of Play Van Abbe 4. Works such as Richard Long’s Wood Circle (1977), James Lee Byars’ Hear TH FI TO IN PH Around this Chair (1978), and Oliver Ressler’s What is Democracy? (2009), functioned merely as a backdrop. Each of the artworks included could have been exchanged with any other. In such a situation it is imperative to ask: in the midst of so much discursive and immersive mediation is there any space left in the museum for art?