New art practices in the field of political decision-making: a process report from projektgruppe.

With this article, the collaborative projektgruppe of Hamburg, Germany, would like to offer an insight into the group's collective practice. A major part of the group's activities includes the editing and publishing of the Journal for Northeast Issues. In 2002, this English-language magazine was established to question culturally relevant concepts of spaces. In particular, it puts the dominant developments of living spaces--of cities, neighborhoods, streets, and buildings--up for debate in the arts. From this point of departure, location-specific issues from diverse social, political, and cultural contexts find room in the journal, and local experiences can thus be shared within a more general framework. Contributions to the journal often also demonstrate new strategies of artistic comment, intervention, or counteractivity in relation to spatial developments.

The art initiative KiP, or Kunstler informieren Politiker (Artists inform politicians), is linked with projektgruppe and the Journal for Northeast Issues in several ways. Two members of the magazine's editorial board, Christoph Rauch and Monika Wucher, actively participated in the initiative. Similarly, KiP participants Doro Carl, Michel Chevalier, Ole Frahm, Jokinen, Petra Lange-Berndt, and Jo Zahn, as well as the initiator and organizer, Cornelia Sollfrank, contributed to projektgruppe's recent Northeast Issues Meeting by offering major topics for debate. (1) The initiative was inspired by a drastic urban development in Hamburg called HafenCity, a masterplan for restructuring former industrial areas, like others found in many globalized cities. In the case of Hamburg, a large part of the old port area, 155 hectares of urban space, makes up the main focus of the city's current urban development politics. Art and culture are asked to play a supporting role in serving this enterprise. The master plan includes planned offices for 40,000 people in Hamburg's HafenCity, a concert hall, several programs of art in public space, and a maritime museum. Against this backdrop, and with the museum project in mind, the KiP initiative launched an innovative and effective activist strategy.

Under the banner "Artists inform politicians," more than one hundred artists and cultural workers have united in Hamburg. They have set out to inform the city's politicians, as well as the public, about the proceedings connected to the International Maritime Museum in Hamburg's new prestigious district. The initiative argued that before the city government granted the museum project equally sizable funds and property (a prominent location in the HafenCity development area), the members of the city parliament had been largely ignorant of the concept of the future museum. Nevertheless, all members voted for its creation with abstentions from a few who cited concerns about the further financing of the new cultural landmark. KiP adopted a specific procedure in order to cope with this paradigmatic political problem and to influence the political decision-making standards from an arts-and-culture point of view.

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The International Maritime Museum will be a private museum, run by the Peter Tamm Foundation and its decisive head Peter Tamm, longstanding chairman of the board of the Axel Springer media group. Axel Springer is one of the biggest European newspaper publishing companies, publishing magazines and newspapers in more than thirty countries. To establish the museum, a private-public partnership has been agreed upon between the city of Hamburg and the Peter Tamm Foundation; Tamm's private collection of naval objects (model ships, ship design plans, nautical instruments, maps, uniforms, weapons, paintings, etc.) will form the cadre of the new museum, and his foundation has full and final authority over the presentation.

The agreement did create some cause for worry, not only because the city of Hamburg provides the 12,000-square-meter historic warehouse for free and finances the private museum enterprise with an extra 30 million euros, but also because of the collector's possibly right-wing reputation. (2) Tamm gained prestige in the late 1960s and early 1970s working on campaigns against the political left, which developed the sales of the media group, and enhanced his own influential position. Later, he started buying up small publishing houses known for right-wing and militaristic literature.

Despite others' worries, the basis for the decision of the city government was neither a convincing museum concept, nor the quality of the collection (which is highly contested among experts). Tamm still holds positions on a number of supervisory boards, which explains his large network of friends and partners throughout all political parties and within the mass media. In addition to Tamm's extended networks, another push factor for the museum was the mere size of the collection, which seems to perfectly match the requirements for a prestigious cultural project in HafenCity.

In August 2005, the initiative "Tamm-Tamm: Kunstler informieren Politiker" came into play. Its basic idea was the following: each of the 121 members of the Hamburg city parliament could be "adopted" by an artist or cultural worker with the aim to open up a discussion about the planned museum. In a personal dialogue, the artists intended to ask their "godchildren"--the politicians--about the individual reasons for their vote. The goal was also to find out to what extent the politicians were informed about the issues they decided on; thus, the critique consequently addressed the politically responsible decision makers.

The artists began their attempts to get in touch with the politicians by writing a personal letter and requesting an interview. Many of the artists also approached their politician with a little gift, the booklet "Tamm-Tamm," which for the first time provided striking information about the collector and his maritime collection. (3) The responses to the artists' requests could hardly be more diverse. While most members of the Christian Democratic Party collectively refused to meet with the artists and had a spokesman send a representative answer, members of both the Social Democratic Party and the Green Party demonstrated more goodwill. Each approach and each encounter, if it happened, was different, depending on the individual attitude of the artist and their particular godparent relationship.

Each KiP participant was free to set their own focus regarding reasoning and aesthetic realizations. The focuses ranged from painting, photography, audio and video material, drawing, collage, and a variety of text, including a documentation of the media echo, in the form of thirty newspaper articles. The diversity and the lively discourse, which has been created by the members of KiP, resulted from the particularly open format of the initative. There was no need to agree on a common denominator. Many of the participating artists did not even know each other personally, and no energy was wasted on internal fights.

The godparent strategy had the potential to make a great impact only because it was backed by the use of electronic communication media. KiP's informational core was, and still is, the common Web site www.tamm-tamm.info, where all contributions are publicly accessible. This publication platform on the Internet and its coordination through a mailing list prove the power of small-scale and do-it-yourself media, which in the case of KiP were even able to jolt media tycoons like Tamm.

Which understanding of art and politics does this project open up? Given the individualism that the art system demands, as well as the related competitive pressure and de-solidarization that are signs of our times, one can be rightly astonished by the fact that over one hundred artists of different generations and work approaches came together in a collective action that expresses their dismay at local cultural policy. To this extent, the project bore its first unlikely fruit.

One reason for this might be the roles that were assigned in a simple arrangement, and were thus easy to grasp. Conceptually, the project did not invent any new material but organized, instead, available resources in a way that brings into focus realities and their inherent potentials. Artists who have been endowed with specific knowledge and concepts are here considered as specialists of a wide field of activities concerning urban culture, museum policy, history, preservation, and mediation of objects and collections; even more, cultural and political education, cultural representation of the city, culture financing concepts, etc. Through the initiative, democracy--for once--was taken seriously. The action was presented as a process of collecting knowledge and exchanging arguments. In the deliberate construction of speech as a one-to-one situation, KiP challenged politicians to prove their willingness to explain their decisions to experts (at best), or at least to respond to inquiries. In practice, however, many politicians resorted to evasions and general responses by official spokesmen in order to spare themselves the embarrassment of having had no idea of what one was deciding.