Catalog EPF 2012 by Patrick Frey

Edition Patrick Frey

Catalog 2012

Max K체ng

Buch N째 3

Max K체ng

Buch N째 3

Max K체ng

Buch N째 3

Max K체ng

Buch N째 3

Max K체ng

Buch N째 3

Catalog 2012

Edition Patrick Frey

Slow Books

Speed is relative. As a publisher, rather than thinking about unstoppable digital acceleration, it is probably smarter to consider why the printed book – the fastest medium in the world before the invention of telegraphy – suddenly seems so slow and heavy, and what this relative increase in weight and sluggishness means for the work of a publisher. Digital books are about freeing content from any physical form. Printed books create “a complex sensation : about the feeling for weight, volume, texture, the smell and sounds of paper, consecutive pages, in short, about the visualhaptical-acoustic-olfactory experience that with each day transforms into a feeling of melancholy, for ever and irreversible. Books will always be there, but they are no longer the imperial format of knowledge. But just as the world’s royal dynasties will not vanish, neither will books. Books are kings with dwindling power, or power already lost, they are no longer the sun kings, but still have the importance of, say, the Spanish royal family.” I wrote these lines for the library of the researcher and artist Andreas Züst, whose atmospheric photographs we published in 2011 in the wonderful book Himmel. Andreas Züst was an obsessive book collector. I think that in the future, small, exquisite publishing houses like Edition Patrick Frey will increasingly publish books exclusively for obsessive book collectors. The slowness of books is reflected in the process of their production. Sometimes it takes two years for dreams to become a reality. Catalog 2012

It was 2010, during the exhibition Where Three Dreams Cross : 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in the Winterthur photo museum, when, amidst all the commotion of guests at the opening, the photographer Gauri Gill from Delhi showed me her dummy for Balika Mela. I was immediately fascinated by the portraits of girls from rural Rajasthan that were taken during the annual fair in a temporary photo studio in 2003. Although the book draft was almost completely perfect, it would have been a shame to have published the book right away. That very year Gauri Gill travelled again to the Mela, the annual fair, and photographed many of the same girls a second time, this time in color. Hence Balika Mela was enhanced, with layers of time resting tenderly over one another, like the pages of parchment on which we printed the newer photographs. The texts are in English and Hindi – since we wanted Balika Mela to be understood at the place where it originated. The book should speak to both an Indian perspective as well as to the Western view – a Western view, for example, like the one so shamelessly and precisely revealed in Miss. Or – in a quite different example – in Marcel Gähler’s collection of spectacular pencil miniatures : Nie ist die Nacht so dunkel wie in der Kindheit (The Night Is Never As Dark As It Is in Childhood) Sometimes it takes even longer for a publishing wish to come true. It was 1981 when I visited the artist Walter Pfeiffer in his small apartment in Zurich and he showed me his sketchbooks from the 1970s for the first time. It was a publisher’s love at first sight. “Walter, I definitely want to publish this !” I said to him, but it took a few more years before I had the publishing house for this kind of project and was able to publish my first book with Walter Pfeiffer : The eyes, the thoughts, ceaselessly wandering (Nachbar der Welt Verlag, 1986). Our conversations often returned to the sketchbooks – and each time Walter Pfeiffer would wave it aside, with his very special mix of shyness and shrewdness. As if he knew that it would be some time before the world was truly ready for these fantastic collages, created with a light but confident hand ; for these wonderful time capsules from the treasure chest of Pfeiffer’s inexhaustible archive ; for his “keen view of Eros, Zeitgeist and popular culture, and his appreciation for the poetry in the mundane” (Martin Jäggi) ; for his “visual intelligence” (Bice Curiger), and above all, for his playful yet disrespectful humor. Perhaps there is a hidden reason why it took more than thirty years and two more books in our publishing house before the Scrapbooks could finally appear. Following only an appetizer in the catalog of his large retrospective in the Winterthur photo museum, they come out finally, now, during the great rise of Walter Pfeiffer’s almost fairytalelike second career as one of the world’s most desired fashion photographers. The few titles mentioned here are, of course, only a small sample of the many jewels among our most recent publications. The Edition Patrick Frey publication program aims at the extraordinariness, Catalog 2012

at the uniqueness of every single work. Whether it be the beauty and the absurdity in Jon Naiman’s portraits of farm animals posing within middle-class interiors ; the wondrous and highly subversive encounter between art and ecological social criticism in Luca Schenardi’s book about birds and humans ; or the meticulousness with which Lurker Grand and his six-person editing team reconstructed the music and cultural scene of the 1980s in heute und danach, the monumental 700-page follow-up volume to the punk anthology Hot Love. To conclude this editorial, a few words concerning matters of our own : the year 2012 brings with it many changes for us. For one, we have to announce a regrettable change to our small team. At the end of September Andreas Koller and I, with a heavy heart, will bid farewell to Mirjam Fischer, who is leaving the publishing house after nearly five extremely productive years with us. I owe her a very big thank you. With her strong sense of books and authors, her immense experience and finely-spun web of contacts in the Swiss cultural scene, Mirjam Fischer has strongly influenced Edition Patrick Frey’s profile, putting the publishing house on a new professional track. We are very pleased, however, to begin a new promising chapter in the history of our Edition with Andrea Kempter. Andrea Kempter brings to our publishing house many years of experience in the book business : in the 1990s she headed her own bookstore in the Kunsthaus Zürich and over the past five years she has developed and directed the Orell Füssli bookstore’s department of art, photo and design books. On another note : the Edition Patrick Frey is shifting somewhat closer, physically, to the epicenter of the Zurich art scene. In October 2012 we will be moving to a new space at Limmatstrasse 268, in the Löwenbräu-Areal, that will serve three functions : publishing office, events room and an –analogue – viewing depot for the more than 120 titles that our house has published thus far. We hope you will find great pleasure and interest in our books. Yours, Patrick Frey, Publisher

Catalog 2012

Table of Contents

Andrea Heller Die Wurzeln sind die Bäume der Kartoffeln

Jon Naiman Familiar Territory

pages 12 – 15

pages 16 – 19

Martin Guiggisberg Miss

Marcel Gähler Nie ist die Nacht so dunkel wie in der Kindheit

pages 20 – 25

9783905929201

Lurker Grand / André Tschan heute und danach

Gauri Gill Balika Mela

pages 30 – 37

page 26 – 29

9783905929164

pages 38 – 47

9783905929249

Walter Pfeiffer Scrapbooks 1969 – 1985

pages 48 – 59

Carolina E. Santo / Véronique Hoegger Buchs

9783905929256 9783905929256

Luca Schenardi An Vogelhäusern mangelt es jedoch nicht

Georg Diez / Christopher Roth 2081 What Happened ?

pages 64 – 67

pages 68 – 75

STUDIOLO / Edition Patrick Frey Trix + Robert Haussmann

9783905 929232

9783905929225

pages 60 – 63

Max Küng Buch Nº 3

page 48-59, Cover

pages 76 – 83

pages 2 – 6, 84 – 89

Edition Patrick Frey Limmatstrasse 268 CH - 8005 Zürich

Cover : Walter Pfeiffer Back cover : Luca Schenardi, Walter Pfeiffer, Georg Diez / Christopher Roth,

T +41 (0)44 381 51 02 F +41 (0)44 381 51 05 mail@editionpatrickfrey.ch www.editionpatrickfrey.com

Concept : Andreas Koller, MAXIMAGE, Marietta Eugster Design : MAXIMAGE and Marietta Eugster Directed and produced by : Andreas Koller, Edition Patrick Frey Print : Medialis, Berlin 11

Andrea Heller Die Wurzeln sind die Bäume der Kartoffeln

Nº 119 ISBN 978-3-905929-19-5 EUR 42 | CHF 52

With texts by Fanni Fetzer, Caroline Kesser and Andrea Heller in German and English Design : Franziska Burkhardt Softcover, 208 pages 157 b/w and color images 16.5 × 22.9 cm | 6 ½ × 9"

A Hellishly Beautiful Universe Darken and illuminate

Text by Fanni Fetzer

Sometimes we walk through a forest that attracts us because it is dark and foreboding. As we approach its edge, the forest lightens, and once we get beyond the underbrush, we can see that the sky is blue, albeit obscured by clouds. This is how it is with Andrea Heller’s artwork : the artist’s name means “lighter” in German, and appropriately enough, her artwork has “lighter” spots. If anything can be said to unite the whole of an œuvre which is so disparate in terms of materials, then it is Andrea Heller’s affinity for the color black : black wool pompoms poking out of cracks, black paper opening up into abysses and black ink covering whole great reams of paper – but then the forest lightens. A dash of violet, a little blue and green, a skin tone or even rainbow colors attract our eyes. Andrea Heller herself describes her artistic technique as a “luring” process : her aim is to capture her audience’s attention with pleasant shapes, materials and color, in order to contrast this cheerful aura with black coloring and the dark materials of horror, of gloom and of the abyss in a stimulating way. Just as she says, her artwork leads to the abyss, to things that are hidden. One might suggest that the artist is wrong here, however – given the fickle attention of the audience, quite the reverse is true. The eye is drawn by gloom, by black. It is only at a second glance that the viewer is charmed by the addition of little bits of color, which make the abyss bearable. Gloom transforms into a pleasant prospect. With Andrea Heller, darkness is always attractive, and her artist’s hand turns unknown terrors into familiar shivers. What a wonderful feeling ! Andrea Heller

Die Wurzeln sind die Bäume der Kartoffeln

Andrea Heller

Die Wurzeln sind die B채ume der Kartoffeln

Andrea Heller

Die Wurzeln sind die B채ume der Kartoffeln

Jon Naiman Familiar Territory

Nº 126 ISBN 978-3-905929-26-3 EUR 56 | CHF 68

With a text by Peter Scott in English Design : Pol Hardcover, 60 pages 30 color images 26 × 37 cm | 10 ¼ × 14 ½" 16

Civilized Dreams

Text by Peter Scott

The Photographs of Jon Naiman

People’s attachment to their pets is often hard to quantify. What seems unreasonable to non-pet lovers – the little sweaters, the cat “motels,” the pictures in the wallet or iPhone – is second nature to animal lovers. Regardless of how exhaustively this bond between species has been addressed in science and culture, humans still find it difficult to fathom animal consciousness (much less their own), leaving ample room for the personification of nonhuman species. Unsurprisingly, this personification is often self-serving, as the human race perpetually attempts to negotiate its place within the natural order of things. While pets have arrived at the privileged position of being adopted into humans’ domain, taking on traits of personhood like names, beds and regular meals, the farm animal exists in a semi-domestic state, enjoying a roof over its head in exchange for work, i.e. a practical contribution to the demands of the farm. As pets may inspire the envy of their owners for the leisurely nature of their existence, the “beasts of burden” and barnyard animals function in the workaday world of rewards for services rendered. Though farmers may occasionally develop emotional bonds with their livestock, a true breach of the familiar hierarchy of “inside” and “outside” animals poses a threat to universal codes of domesticity adopted by industrialized societies. Inviting the farm animals inside and proposing a breach in social decorum, Jon Naiman’s Familiar Territory photographs maintain an almost deadpan position towards the unlikely inclusion of a rooster or horse within the domestic sphere. Reminiscent of the surrealist humor in American sitcoms, where a pig (Arnold in Green Acres),

or a horse (the talking horse in Mr. Ed) crosses the threshold of “use” to enjoy some of the rights of family membership, Naiman’s photographs pose a challenge to the delicate balance struck between the unpredictability of the natural world “out there” and the rational and hygienic norms characteristic of a stable domestic environment. Composed as informal group portraits within modern middle-class homes mostly located in rural areas, the subjects often look towards the camera with no particular surprise or concern. The cow, goat, or pony in their midst, while presumably a curiosity, has been welcomed into the home while the normal familial relations, so carefully choreographed day in and day out, have expanded to accommodate creatures whose “naturalism” precludes them from this setting on a daily basis. When looking at conventional family portraits, we can probably assume that the harmony and calm we find in these pictures is a public projection, an act of domestic diplomacy meant to register with society at large as a confirmation of membership within a broader category of “family.” As such, the rivalries, indignities, and jockeying for position within the family unit are downplayed for the sake of its image, an often carefully maintained and protected commodity (a “good” family) which is meant to ensure the success of both the individual members and the group. This image of domestic order, while appearing outwardly natural, often serves to veil more primitive human instincts. Incorporating outdoor animals into this convention, Jon Naiman’s Familiar Territory photographs reveal the contradictions evident in the often facile distinctions we make between nature and culture.

Jon Naiman

Familiar Territory

Jon Naiman

Familiar Territory

Jon Naiman

Familiar Territory

Nº 120

Martin Guggisberg Miss

ISBN 978-3-905929-20-1 EUR 42 | CHF 52

9783905929201

9783905929201 9783905929201 9783905929201 9783905929201

Design : Hi, Megi Zumstein and Claudio Barandun Hardcover, Softcover, 76 pages 32 color images 20 × 30 cm | 7 4/5 × 11 4/5" 20

Miss Auto Emotions, Miss Pole Fitness, Miss Do-It-Yourself, Miss Handicap, Miss Russian Switzerland, Miss Bikini, Miss Pit Stop Day, Miss Cambodia, Miss Bern-East, Miss Paysanne Suisse, Miss Tuning, Miss Landi, Miss Wild West, Miss Tourismus Switzerland, Miss Asia or Miss Polefitness are the names of beauty contests which take place at the Radisson Blue Hotel in Basel, at the Berghaus Gobeli in Zweisimmen or at the cantonal road traffic department in Baden. Dramaturgy and choreography often follow a similar patternâ&#x20AC;&#x160;: catwalk runs of the candidates, film portraits, PowerPoint slide shows, a statement about the situation of the world today and performances by local music groups. In the course of the success of the Miss Swiss pageant at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of the year 2000, a lot of local beauty contests started appearing. There are hardly as many contests of this nature in any other Western industrial nation. The photographs taken between 2006 and 2011 are relentless contemporary documents, which illustrate the miss cult and its iconography at their exceeded zenith and in which over and over, rather unexpected, grace and elegance scintillate. Martin Guggisberg

Miss

Miss Tuning 2009, Bea Expo, Bern

Martin Guggisberg

Miss

Martin Guggisberg

Miss

Miss Bikini 2008, Bernhard-Theater, Zurich

Martin Guggisberg

Miss

Martin Guggisberg

Miss

Marcel Gähler Nie ist die Nacht so dunkel wie in der Kindheit

Nº 124 ISBN 978-3-905929-24-9 EUR 38 | CHF 48

With a text by Peter Stamm in German and English Design : Jens Müller Hardcover, 110 pages 49 b/w images 16.5 × 22 cm | 6 ½ × 8 3/5" 26

The Night Is Never As Dark As It Is in Childhood

Text by Peter Stamm Translated from the German by Catherine Schelbert

The night is never as dark as it is after fireworks. We climbed up the hill at twilight where they light the bonfire every year. We bought a cup of apple juice from the Youth Association’s stand and sat down on one of the benches. The children are already shouting : they’re lighting the fire. Although somebody poured fuel over the pile of wood, it takes a long time until the fire is blazing. You can see other fires in the distance. Maybe a brass band is playing over there, maybe a choir is singing, maybe someone is roasting sausages. Every celebration is a little different and yet they are all the same, they all blend into one great celebration. The children start setting off the fireworks they’ve brought along. It is almost windless ; the acrid smoke lies suspended in the air like wisps of fog. The bright light of the Bengali firecrackers is blinding. The child starts crying, he’s afraid of the noise ; clinging to our hands, he pulls us away from the celebration. There, where the darkness begins, you can feel the cool night, its uncanniness. The night is never as dark as it is in childhood. Hidden there are unknown dangers, ghosts and witches and wild animals. But it also offers shelter. The space is only as large as the light of the candle, a lantern, a fire. People gather around the source of light, look into the flames, tell fireside stories, memories. Then the light flickers, the fire goes out and the fear of darkness abruptly transports us back to the present. Being unable to see anything sharpens the sense of hearing. Rooms open up, distances change, directions become approximate. Did you hear that ? What is it ? It’s only the wind. Extremely bright light resembles darkness. At noon, the sky in the mountains sometimes looks almost black. At the beach, the sun is so strong that we can hardly make anything out. Colors disappear as much in bright light as they do in darkness, they fade, drowning in white. The noon demons are no less dangerous than the nocturnal ones. Looking at the sun can make you blind. Black-white is not colorless. It is the medium of light, not a reduction but rather a concentration on essentials. Colors are imprecise, they are not to be taken for granted. We have given them names in order to remember them but the transitions are hard to distinguish. Some animals see different colors than we do, some see none at all. The graphics cards in our computers promise millions of colors but some languages don’t even differentiate between green and blue.

Etymologically the word yellow comes from the Indo-European ghelmeaning bright and shiny, and the word blue from the Indo-European bhel- meaning shiny and bright. Colorful is an order. When our children draw without using all the colors in their paint boxes, we diagnose a developmental disorder. Children actually much prefer painting in monochrome colors. One of the useless bits of advice that parents give their children : why don’t you try a different color. I suspect that our dreams are black-and-white. I think our memories are less colorful than the world around us. They are not films in HD or 3D but rather slideshows on a wobbly screen in a room that isn’t dark enough. Not moving pictures but snapshots that are both sharp and blurred : sharp in appearance, which can involve all sense perceptions ; blurred in origin, even when we can assign a year, month, and even a day to them by consulting our diaries. Summer holidays 2007 at the Costa Brava, a sledding excursion with friends and their children during the last Christmas holidays, an August First celebration, what year was that ? M. must’ve been five or six years old at the time. And who’s that in the background ? Is he with us ? A stranger, who is actually not much stranger than we ourselves have become in these pictures. In fact, isn’t everyone there a stranger ? Didn’t someone else draw that ? But in art, individuals turn into deputies and we recognize alien pictures as our own. Some works of art tell us more about ourselves than our own holiday snapshots. In a few years we’ll laugh about the bathing suits, the hairdos. Can you remember wearing this dress ? Children will be a little embarrassed by their previous selves, their baby fat, their innocent nudity. But the power of the emotions evoked by these pictures does not fade, does not age. Sometimes, as years pass, they become even more powerful and compelling or at least more obvious, two weeks at the seaside distilled in a picture. We have no resumé in our memories, only summed up experiences. Memory can make yesterday seem farther away than a day ten or twenty years ago. There are gaps in between, of months or years. Memories are like distant bonfires in the night-time landscape of the Alps, sources of light, around which a few people huddle for fear of the darkness.

Marcel Gähler

Nie ist die Nacht so dunkel wie in der Kindheit

Marcel G채hler

Nie ist die Nacht so dunkel wie in der Kindheit

Marcel G채hler

Nie ist die Nacht so dunkel wie in der Kindheit

Gauri Gill Balika Mela

Nº 116 ISBN 978-3-905929-16-4 EUR 56 | CHF 68

9783905929164

9 7839 164 05 929 9 7839

164 05 929 9 7839

9 7839

164

05 929

9 7839

05 929

164

05 929

9 7839 With texts by Gauri Gill and Manju Saran in English and Hindi Design : Marietta Eugster

Softcover 180 pages 72 b/w and 32 color images 19.2 × 26.4 cm 7 ½ × 10 ²/5" 30

Gauri Gill

Balika Mela

Gauri Gill

Balika Mela

Gauri Gill

Balika Mela

Gauri Gill

Balika Mela

Gauri Gill

Balika Mela

Gauri Gill

Balika Mela

Rememory

Gauri Gill

The writer Toni Morrison used the word “rememory” to refer to the act of remembering memories, physically or mentally. “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my re-memory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the picture of it stays, and not just in my re-memory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

Gauri Gill

Balika Mela

Lurker Grand / André Tschan heute und danach

Nº 121 ISBN 978-3-905929-21-8 EUR 62 | CHF 78

Edited by Lurker Grand and André Tschan With texts by Wolfgang Bortlik, Alain Croubalian, Michael Lütscher, Sam Mumenthaler and many others Design : PrillVieceliCremers Softcover, 600 pages More than 2,000 b/w and color images and a detailed discography with more than 1,500 titles 20.5 × 27.5 cm | 8 × 10 4/5 " 38

HERTZ, Der Mond / Das Schicksal, 7 ", 1979 design by Peter Fischli

Lurker Grand / André Tschan

heute und danach

UnknownmiX, Sincerely / Habibi, 7 ", 1991 design by Hans-Rudolf Lutz

Lurker Grand / André Tschan

heute und danach

Punk Festival Basel, Sommer-Casino Basel, 1980

Lurker Grand / André Tschan

heute und danach

Grosses Fest in der Roten Fabrik, Zurich, 1979

Lurker Grand / André Tschan

heute und danach

When Pop Turned Postmodern

Text by Tobi Müller

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The 1980s in Switzerland are framed by two distinctive historical events. The opera house in Zurich comes under attack at the start of the decade, and the Fichen Affair is exposed in Bern at its end. Meanwhile the Wall falls in Berlin (and the army almost falls in Switzerland). Between these extremes of a decade that is moving towards the collapse of the grand narratives, a new social force emerges. It is the creative class, the poor cousin of capitalism. Evolving from the bohemian – once the low-grade proletariat without a social consciousness – it becomes an important agent of structural change. “The Rise of the Creative Class,” as it is later called by the trend researcher Richard Florida, leads to the so-called urban revitalization of inner cities. The creative class takes over the space recently left behind by the dying industry, and turns the barren areas into hip new quarters. First it was the “crackpots,” then the artists, then the entrepreneurs. As a creative indivi-

dual, one has to live with this legacy, and should always keep it in mind when tracing the relatively rapid, extra ordinarily diverse and exciting, still influential, development that music and art went through during this decade. The post-punk artists, graphic designers and illustrators were a part of this new class that still marks our cities today. But what exactly is meant here when we speak of music and art ? The eighties is also the decade that tries to abolish this distinction. Music becomes art and art becomes music. The sound gets a picture and the pictures get loud. At first it presents itself as little more than a furious attitude towards life : What prevailed was an expressive realism, a hyperventilating authenticity. In the creative scene, the professionals smelled funny ; the laymen were kings. But then the decade set off to majorly revise and remake the past. Art and music history were remeasured and rewritten, copied and cut-up, pasted and set, and in the end, even

Lurker Grand / André Tschan

heute und danach

digitally computed. The tones and the pictures transcended beyond their immediate function ; they were multiply coded, literally complex, and therefore, art. This self-awareness was followed by a consciousness of one’s own place in history. The bang of the moment was followed by the reflection in time. What we today call retro was tried out many times, especially in the Independent Sector. This comes through not only in the music : pictures reveal it too (cassette boxes, concert posters, LP and CD covers, flyers, etc.). All beginnings are in the tools – and in the material from which a picture is made. The course grid of so many early cassette covers is simply due to the low-quality of photocopying at that time. And if you have nothing more at your disposal than a pair of scissors and a bit of glue, you end up automatically doing montage and bricolage. A wild mix of cut-out texts, various sizes, hundreds of different vectors in a single picture : The untidiness of the early days is quite consistent with the desired dilettantism of the music. But we are in Switzerland, the land of good form, of world famous typographers and designers. This tradition did not leave New Wave and Post-Punk untouched. If even Peter Saville, the most famous pop-designer in the world, on an album cover for New Order makes reference to Josef Müller-Brockmann and a wonderfully rigid, typographic poster from 1960, than there is no way that this influence from Switzerland can simply be airbrushed out. The German band Kraftwerk, whose influence is unsurpassed, adopted elements of the Russian avant-garde in the 1970s, borrowing especially from El Lissitzky for the appearance of MenschMaschine (1978). But Kraftwerk’s project was about dehumanized music ; the graphics, in turn, had to be sterile. Where historic modernisms show up in the post-punk Switzerland of the early 1980s, it is not about an anti-humanistic utopia. Quite the contrary, it is still about self-realization. However, the main focus continues to be on setting itself off from the hippies’ psychedelic innerself kitsch (in this regard Post-Punk remains totally true to punk). Even in the 2000s, when a retro guitar band like Franz Ferdinand joined the course quality of a photocopier with the picture language of the Russian avant-garde on its album cover, the pop consumer was reminded more of the 1980s than of the 1920s (You Could Have It So Much Better, 2005). Even as a copy, the 1980s jump out at us – fast, dynamic, assertive. What sounds today like something from the mouth of a supervisor on cocaine, back then was a part of a subculture.

Lurker Grand / André Tschan

heute und danach is the followup project to the book Hot Love, already in its second printing, about the punk movement in Switzerland (Edition Patrick Frey, Nº 68). –> page 94

heute und danach

Santé Public, Höllenroutine / Heavenly Dead, 7 ", 1983

Taboo, The Same Word, LP & CD & MC, 1988 design by Ernst Gamper

Hertz, Eine Auswahl, CD, 2002 design by Peter Fischli

Hertz, RAS… DVA… TRI, MC, 1980

UnknownmiX, UX, MC, 1984 design by Hans-Rudolf Lutz

Splendid, The 1984 Cassingles Collection, MC, 1985 design by Martin Schori

Lurker Grand / André Tschan

heute und danach

Liliput, Die Matrosen / Split, 7 ", 1980 design by Peter Fischli

The Kick (Promo), Backside / Black, 7 ", 1985

Kraft Durch Freude (KDF), Wir Bleiben Kameraden, 12 ", 1979

Kie 13, Music For Zeros, 7 ", 1980 design by Andreas Kreienbühl

UnknownmiX, Looptape, MC, 1984 design by Hans-Rudolf Lutz

The Crow, MC, 1990

Lurker Grand / André Tschan

heute und danach

Liliput, Eisiger / Wind, When The Cat’s Away Then The Mice Will Play, 7 ", 1980 design by Peter Fischli and Peter Wittwer, photography by Katja Becker

Lurker Grand / André Tschan

heute und danach

Walter Pfeiffer Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

Nº 125

ISBN 978-3-905929-25-6 EUR 82 | CHF 98

Edited by Martin Jaeggi and Walter Pfeiffer With an interview with Walter Pfeiffer in German and English Design : Studio Achermann Hardcover, 460 pages, 224 color images 24 × 30.4 cm | 9 ½ × 12" 48

Walter Pfeiffer

Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

Walter Pfeiffer

Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

Walter Pfeiffer in conversation with Martin Jaeggi

Recycling leftovers is my hobby

Martin Jaeggi : How did the “scrapbooks” come about ?

MJ : The first picture you pasted in it is one that you drew.

Walter Pfeiffer : They were basically my hobby. I got a kick out of pasting things together, odds and ends, scraps and found pieces. It would be hard to do now because I’d be much too self-conscious. I made the very early scrapbooks almost unconsciously. I started fiddling with the first one in 1971. At the time I was working as a stylist in the fashion studio of Globus, a high-end department store. That’s why a Globi figure (character in the eponymous Swiss comic book series) is dangling from the book. Globus gave us a beautiful, expensive diary with empty pages in which we were probably supposed to keep track of our business appointments. I thought it was a pity to use such a beautiful book for that and later, after I was laid off, I started pasting things into it. I only worked at Globus for a couple of months. The fashion studio folded because business was bad and all of a sudden we were out on the street. But they let me take the beautiful, empty diary along.

WP : That’s my first film poster. After losing my job I tried to make ends meet by working as an illustrator. The poster advertises a cycle of gangster movies. Those were the days of pure nostalgia. Everybody in Zurich was running around like a hippie with long hair while me and my friends went to the cinema, often three times a day, to watch old movies. We collected Art Deco furniture that was dirt cheap in those days because nobody was interested in it. The same spirit is reflected in the pictures of film stars from the 1930s on the following pages.

Walter Pfeiffer

Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

MJ : How did you find these pictures ? WP : Women’s Wear Daily was required reading at Globus and I often cut photos out of it for myself. Like the picture of the Duchess of Windsor in hot pants. That was when all the women started wearing hot pants so they got a lot of coverage in Women’s Wear Daily. Besides, you could buy English and American magazines 51

Scrapbook “Agenda 1971,” Globus Diary

Scrapbook “1974” Walter Pfeiffer

Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

in junk shops. When something appealed to me, I clipped and saved it. When I’d collected enough, I started pasting. Packaging also intrigued me, like these bags for effervescent tablets. They tasted awfully artificial but I liked the graphic art. In fact graphic art in general… After I left Globus, I took a two-year course in graphic art and that’s probably how I learned to paste. Because, before the computer took over, graphic art consisted mostly of pasting. MJ : The pictures of men in sexy underwear are unusually daring for those days. WP : They’re from the Tom Men’s Shop catalog : It was a cult brand, the first clothes store in Zurich that catered pretty openly to gay customers. I collected the old catalogs and cut out the best pictures. The models in them were really great up until the 1970s ; later they weren’t as attractive anymore. I liked the underwear and I always wondered who would buy something like that. MJ : You started taking photographs after you finished your first scrapbook. How did that come about ? WP : I took them with a Polaroid Swinger, my first camera, black and white and with the smallest film. They show close friends who used to mill around in the small room I was living in. It had a table and a chair, and the people who visited me hung around on the bed while I sat at the table drawing. We used to take a lot of Nobrium, a sedative that you could get across the counter in Italy. I was working as an illustrator, a job that was beneath all the “important” artists because it was only applied art. I wanted to become a “real” artist but all I got was condescending smiles.

“I got a kick out of pasting things together, odds and ends, scraps and found pieces. It would be hard to do now because I’d be much too self-conscious.”

1969 and 1974, sort of like reviewing my life at the time. MJ : Why did you start concentrating more and more on photography ?

WP : That was one I made because I was invited to a competition of autobiographical artists’ books, organized by Harald Szeemann and a few other people. I decided to participate, bought some plastic binders and began assembling photographs I’d taken between

WP : It kept getting more important because I often used photographs as source images for my hyperrealistic pictures ; a lot of them crop up in this book too. The book starts with a page of self-portraits, followed by the very first photograph I ever took, a group portrait of the clique I was hanging around with in those days. It shows the artists Urs Lüthi, Manon and Lisa Enderli, the fashion designers Ursula Rodel and Sissi Zöbeli, the art dealer Brigitte Weiss, then someone I had a secret crush on at the time and a young woman whose large eyes always made us think of Dietrich. I thought this group so marvelous that I wanted to take a picture of them. Actually, I was just supposed to set up the group was so that somebody else could take the picture. But then I asked him if I could take a picture too and it turned out to be the best one. On the opposite page there are

Walter Pfeiffer

Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

MJ : The second book titled 1969 – 1972 looks much more deliberate and homogeneous.

Scrapbook “1969 – 1972,” left page : Group portrait ; opposite page : Hulda Zumsteg

Scrapbook “März 1976,” left page : Manon Walter Pfeiffer

Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

Scrapbook “Bemängelungsbuch” , Beat

Scrapbook (untitled), 6000 gais au soleil de Montpellier Walter Pfeiffer

Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

two shots of Hulda Zumsteg, the legendary manager of the Kronenhalle restaurant, and the drawing that is based on them. The portrait was commissioned, a gift for her son Gustav Zumsteg. I was doing a lot of portraits in order to earn money. But my own works were made on the basis of photographs. For example, you can see a picture of feet that I drew next to the source photographs. I won my first (Swiss) Federal Grant with this picture and two others. MJ : Why your interest in feet ? WP : I was visiting Manolo Blahnik in London and he kept talking about feet. We had met at an opening of Allen Jones, where he complimented me on my shoes. He was just starting out and he had designed the shoes Twiggy wore in Ken Russell’s musical The Boy Friend. Another important part of this book are the pictures I made for Transformer – Aspekte der Travestie, an exhibition Jean-Christophe Ammann mounted in Lucerne in 1974. MJ : Who is pictured in the photographs that are not directly related to your work as a draftsman ?

prize and naturally it was her book that got printed. After the Transformer exhibition, H. R. Giger’s partner, Li Tobler, asked me if I wanted to have an exhibition in her newly opened gallery. She had already shown Manon’s boudoir, and afterwards Jürgen Klauke, but then she killed herself. I showed collages that I had made of photographs on patterned fabrics and the book was shown on a table in the middle of the room. The critic Fritz Billeter wrote an article expressing surprise that somebody would celebrate homosexuality so openly in Zurich. After winning this first prize I decided that I would continue pasting books as a hobby. I made a book for the [Swiss] Federal Grant, but I didn’t get it. The book was probably too playful because art was a very serious and labored affair in those days. And it didn’t really change until Fischli/Weiss came along. MJ : The book you’re talking about has a binding that’s wrapped up in a green net. You also begin working with words in it. What is it that interests you about language ?

WP : I sent in the book and then got a letter saying that I had won first place. The plan was to print the winner’s book. But I wasn’t the only one that got the first prize. Ingeborg Lüscher, Szeemann’s partner, was also awarded the first

WP : I started filling notebooks with sentences that I heard in the tram, on the radio or read in newspapers. Actually I collected these phrases as possible titles for works but then they developed a life of their own and finally ended up as the basis for “Walterspiel”, a play that I staged in 1981. I also collected names that somehow seem to suggest a certain figure like, for instance, Miriam von Kastanieneck. The first part of the book followed the same pattern as “1969 bis 1974”. I arranged the photographs on doublepage spreads, and then started adding captions. Afterwards I began making more of a mix of my own and found pictures and texts, and did the same thing in the two following books (pink binding, green binding labeled “März 1976”). For example, you can see Lady Shiva, the legendary hooker who died very young, and Beat, my star at the time. He wanted to become a model and I staged him as a tennis player so that he could use the pictures to look for work but it didn’t pan out. Athletics was always the non plus ultra for me, or rather the athletes. My to-die-for ideal of beauty was judoka Jürg Röthlisberger ; he crops up a lot in these books.

Walter Pfeiffer

Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

WP : People I knew, my stars and starlets. At the beginning I lived in one small room and had a freezing studio but I thought it was better to live and work in the same place. And I had the opportunity to do that when I lived in a gigantic old villa for two years that was scheduled for demolition. A lot of people were always going in and out. New people came. Everybody brought somebody else along. I was constantly taking pictures, at first with a Polaroid, later with a real camera, but as you can see, I could only afford to have small prints made. In 1976, I was so tired of the constant coming and going that I moved into a smaller apartment. MJ : And how did the book do in the competition ?

Scrapbook “Gebucht,” made for the Swiss Federal Grant

Scrapbook “1969 – 1972” Walter Pfeiffer

Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

Scrapbook “Walterisation,” A note from Manolo

Scrapbook “May Day,” Self-portraits Walter Pfeiffer

Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

MJ : Where did you get the porn from ? WP : I had a fan who used to bring me stacks of porn magazines. I could never have afforded them myself ; they were outrageously expensive although you could only get them in sleazy stores. Soft porn was really big too back then. At the movies we saw Emmanuelle and Histoire d’O. MJ : When you leaf through the books you sometimes get the feeling they show a Switzerland that is long gone. How would you characterize them ? WP : Looking back, it’s almost romantic. There were lots less people ; it was much less dense, and we were all still a little naïve ; you didn’t drag everything into the glaring light. That made it very appealing. A lot of things happened in secret ; you can see that in the clippings about closing down the Beckenhof, a well-known gay meeting place. First there was the park behind the National Museum. Before the drug scene took over, it was a world-famous meeting place for gays ; then came the Beckenhof. Today all of that is gone – the toilets in the station where men were masturbating by the dozens, the hustlers in the arcades. Today everything’s so enlightened and clean ; everybody acts as if they know all about everything. MJ : That was followed by the book Choco Prince, which has chocolate packaging on practically every page. What fascinated you so much about it ? WP : I just thought it was so beautiful, especially the colors. It was a book I made in preparation for my first exhibition abroad in Rotterdam in 1977. I got carried away and designed a huge environment with all kinds of bric-a-brac and colored nets. For this book I developed this particular aesthetic and the chocolate packaging was a great inspiration, just like the chocolate itself – thanks to which I gained several pounds. The next book, titled Sketchbook, was also made in preparation for an exhibition that I had at Galerie Maurer in Zurich. The owner of the gallery was a society woman so she knew about the portraits I’d been commissioned to do and decided to do an exhibition with me. UnfortunaWalter Pfeiffer

“I had a fan who used to bring me stacks of porn magazines.”

tely she didn’t sell anything because I only showed drawings of beautiful young boys and girls and a black-and-white block of highcontrast, brightly lit photographs, which are also on a double-page spread in the book. The series was a dramatic counterpart to the color series “Chez Walti”. It reflects the mood that prevailed in those days, the lightheartedness of 1976/77 had suddenly vanished. A lot of people ended up on drugs or in jail, and some died. In addition, the book contains some of the visuals I used for the first evening course I taught at the F&F (School of Art and Media Design, Zurich). MJ : In the next book, My Day, there are a lot of self-portraits, even a computer-generated one. Where did you make that one ? WP : I read in the paper that you could have a computer portrait made of yourself at the office trade fair in Zurich. Obviously, I couldn’t resist. I made most of the other self-portraits in these photo booths, which have now practically disappeared. Scrapbooks 1969 –1 985

9783905 9292 5

Design : Julia Rommel 4 books, hardcover, 50 pages each with 43 color images each 14 × 18 cm | 5 ½ × 7 "

9783905 9292 5

With texts by Carolina E. Santo and photographs by Véronique Hoegger

Nº 122 ISBN 978-3-905929 -22-5 EUR 38 | CHF 48

52 929 509387 9

Carolina E. Santo / Véronique Hoegger Buchs

Buchs is a reference to four cities bearing the same name in the Swiss cantons St. Gallen, Zurich, Aargau and Lucerne. Four places with the same name in four different areas – “4 Books for 4 Buchs” are four different tales that address the ordinary daily life of a young woman who appears to be both a single person and many figures at once, and whose identity is left unclear. Nothing special happens. With texts and images that are similar but not the same, the four books tell a related but not identical story about “non-events” that take place during a single day.

Carolina E. Santo / Véronique Hoegger

Buchs

Buchs AG The sky has suddenly changed. It will probably rain for a short time before the sun comes out again. She recognizes the car parked on the right just after the sign. It belongs to Tamara.

Buchs SG She enjoys the preparation of special events at the restaurant. They usually have beautiful flower arrangements. The girl who makes them is called Anna.

Carolina E. Santoâ&#x20AC;&#x2030;/ VĂŠronique Hoegger

Buchs

Buchs LU Last year she took computer lessons after work. Now, she can produce all sorts of things on her own. Flyers, birthday cards, photo albums, and much more. Her instructor’s name was Esther.

Buchs ZH There is a watercolor artist living in the village. Her name is Ellis.

Carolina E. Santo / Véronique Hoegger

Buchs

Luca Schenardi An Vogelhäusern mangelt es jedoch nicht

3 2 9 2 9 89 7 3905

Nº 123

2 3 2 9 99 783 05 92

ISBN 978-390592923-2

2 3 2 9 2 99 783 05 9 9783905 929232 9 783905 929232 09 7839 5 92 9 783905 92923 9783905 929232 2

EUR 56 | CHF 68

With texts by Hans Schmid, Klaus Ewald and Rob van de Pol in German Design : Hi, Megi Zumstein and Claudio Barandun Hardcover, 284 pages b/w and color images throughout 21 × 28 cm | 8 ¹/5 × 11"

9 783905 92923 9 783905 92923

2 2

Luca Schenardi

An Vogelh채usern mangelt es jedoch nicht

But there is no lack of birdhouses (An VogelhĂ¤usern mangelt es jedoch nicht) But there is no lack of birdhouses is the first time that ornithological specialized knowledge has been joined with subjective perception, in a presentation of great urgency and artistic passion. This art book brings together drawings, computer illustrations, photography and specially-created bird portraits. Through his own subjective imagery and pictorial language, Luca Schenardi fills the unresearched gap linking human impact, influenced by materialism, to the decline of nature. Using birds as an indication of the human way of life. Schenardiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s artistic expression is characterized by biting social criticism and cynicism, but also by anger and melancholy. With his off-beat humor and irony, however, he is able to avoid the prevalent cultural pessimism.

Luca Schenardi

An VogelhĂ¤usern mangelt es jedoch nicht

Luca Schenardi

An Vogelh채usern mangelt es jedoch nicht

Georg Diez and Christopher Roth 2081 What Happened ?

Softcover, 128 pages color images throughout 17 × 24 cm | 6 ½ × 9 ½"

Nº 128 ISBN 978-3-905929-28-7 EUR 18 | CHF 27

Yoda

a) Yoda : It is the future you see. Luke : The future ? Will they die ? Yoda (closes his eyes for a moment) : Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future. b) The Artificial Kid by Bruce Sterling takes place on the planet Reverie, a world of levitating islands, and the transformative wilderness of The Mass. Reverie has been transformed into a utopia/ dystopia. Arti, a heavily biologically modified boy from the Decriminalized Zone, becomes a pop star by selling bloody combat videos of himself. When Reverie’s founder, Moses Moses emerges from seven centuries of cryosleep, and Arti discovers a secret about his past, both have to flee to escape the powers of Cabal.

everywhere. The first city that juxtaposes the old and the new world. All Berlin architecture from the 1930s clung to geometry, with the cubes and cylinders that are the residue of nineteenth-century geometric thinking. Insofar as it is truly modern, Berlin projects the opposite image. In which European city can one feel

Yoda Surface a) Slavoj Žižek Masks Okay. Art. Capitalism Sur- Hisory face AIDS The Human League Africa b) Sarah Nuttall American Gigolo b) Paul Schrader Capitalism II As swift to me as heavenly light ! Opera Ž Playlists II 2081 Revolution Drugs Ships Colors Cycles d) Problems of our Times Borg vs. Mc Enroe c) Wimbledon b) Paul Schrader: “I think it is more a car commercial – American Gigolo is a film about surfaces, about a man who lives on the surface, who can’t look into himself, who takes cocaine in order to get dressed. It is that kind of film where a wrinkle in the shirt requires you to do another take. A wrinkle in the shirt is the same thing as a fluff in the dialogue. That’s how surface driven it was. Then I had this perverse idea, just taking the ending of Pickpocket and slapping it on this very superficial film.” c) Dave Eggers : “My problem with so much postmodernism is that there isn’t anything there at the core. A lot of times it’s all superficial and formal and experimental. If you’re telling some amazing story but you’re doing it in an unusual way, great, but if, at the end, it’s all some sort of formal exercise, it’s very empty.”

b) “Nonsense. This is stupid enlightened humanism !” c) “One of the most disgusting things is when what you secretly dream about is brutally imposed on you from the outside. We have a nice name for a realized dream, it’s called a nightmare.” d) “I am a Lacanian psychoanalyst. Ethics yes, but ethics without morality. “Yes. Usually for philosophers, these immoral, old-fashioned existential terms, you choose your Entwurf and you remain faithful to it whatever the cost. But I don’t see the opposition between morality always has this element of narcissistic satisfaction in patronizingly imposing upon others. That you know better than the other what is good for the other.”

Michel Serres: a) “The models that I employ are generally fluid and rather complex mosaics. I come from a scientific background. In our grandparents’ anatomy manuals from the 1930s, we can find illustrations of the hips, the lungs, and the knees that feature the bones, the joints, and the muscular attachments–they were geometric and descriptive diagrams. Today’s anatomy manuals contain images made by nuclear magnetic resonance of the hips of a 15-year-old girl, the hips of an old man in his eighties, and the hips of a pregnant woman. We can see singularities. Interesting are the specificities of a given age, of a certain woman. Today science represents very precise singularities, it is no longer schematic as it once was. The great geometric designs have completely disappeared from science, even though they governed philosophy from Hegel until Bergson. They had big diagrams about history that now make us laugh. From a cognitive point of view, we are no longer in that mindset. We have chaos theory, which demonstrates how an extremely minuscule event can provoke major consequences. Who would have thought 20 years ago that an extremely small event could set in motion a gigantic cyclone ?” b) “You know, we are sitting here in Berlin by the river. When I see this architecture here, I say to myself, Oh, that was the era when we still believed in geometry. Now we believe more in botany. And Berlin is an extraordinary city because it has very advanced buildings, but it is also very green ; it has all those lakes, forests, and trees–there is grass

calm, can one cycle or walk freely ?” c) At 80, he is the philosopher of the moment. He talks about communication, about fluid and flexible structures, about the creative power of mistakes, and about the rights we should give to nature that would allow it to protect itself better against man. He is not an environmentalist ; he just thinks. And he talks. Long, clear sentences. The French school. He talks about rivers. He is the son of a boatsman. He sits on the bank of the river, the Spree. It was nonstop Serres these last few days. A press conference on a boat, a reading performance before an audience filled with young people eager to understand, a battle of minds with Alexander Kluge, the filmmaker and author who masks his invincible intelligence behind questions which never ask anything ; they do, however, sometimes surprise. With Serres Kluge had found his match. Serres said that the symbolic lighthouse Kluge talked about meant something more than he thought it did. For Kluge, the lighthouse guides people ; Serres countered that a lighthouse is there to warn you not to come. It is meant to keep people away.

Masks

a) All Then/ Žižek, 2047, December, part of masked simian deity. Origins obscure. We don’t know, we really don’t know how these godheads came

b) Art is a boy’s name. Joy in Art is pornographic. Andy Warhol, 1980 c) The Lower East Side was completely destroyed. We actually shot a scene in the Chelsea Hotel. But in those days you would just say to the waiter, ‘Can we stay here for an hour and shoot this scene ?’ And the guy would say, ‘Okay, why not ?’

which is not true, evidently, but for narration’s sake the name stuck. Scientists would track his flight course during that year, map his intercourse, trying to find a pattern. They would look at it as if it would reveal the story of this new disease. We want to talk to Françoise Barré-Sinoussi about all this, the race to solve the riddle, the myths that got out of hand, the epochal changes, but it will turn out this is not how it works. The thriller is in our mind, in our imagination, it might be a projection even. What she will tell us is a very different story, one that substitutes T4 cells for patients and representation for reality. Scientists, mind you, are rational people. b) Paul Schrader : “It was also at Nando’s house that he was trying to tell me about this thing they were calling ‘gay cancer’. I just said : ‘What are you, fuckin’ crazy ? There is no such thing as gay cancer.’ That was the first time I heard of it. It was a matter of two or three years and everybody knew and I lost many friends. Nando Scarfiotti among others. Half of the people I knew. That put an end to that kind of cultural moment.” c) Françoise BarréSinoussi II: “It’s unbelieveable how much data we have accumulated regarding interaction between the virus and the host. We speak generally about what’s going on in the blood, it is in the breast milk, the lymph nodes. We know now from the last five, ten years that parts of the virus are only affecting the gut, and that one of the first things that the virus is capable of doing is to induce a very strong depletion of CD4+ cells in the gut. As a consequence of the destruction in the gut and the destruction of the intestinal coating, there are some components of bacteria that go through the gut and are capable of activating and altering the cells of our immune system. We have a lot of evidence that the virus is affecting the human being and components of the body in the first hour after entry into the body, we are thinking of prioritizing an understanding of what’s going on within the first 96 hours after infection.” d) Oliviero Toscani : “In the 1980s I managed to get it commercialized. I really don’t care about sweaters and I think that people on the street have much more interesting and real problems than sweaters. This was the time of AIDS, with Reagan saying that it was just a problem for homosexuals. I said, I don’t think so. I think that young people are really concerned about AIDS. I think young people are really concerned about racism and their treatment in a society that is getting more and more colorful. That’s why later I did a magazine called Colors. I wanted to make a magazine without news and without celebrities. So I killed the concept on which every magazine is based.” e) Sarah Nuttall : The story goes like this : As soon as you get rid of apartheid, AIDS rises. As AIDS rises, crime rises, at least in a particular kind of journalistic imagination, and that becomes the story. 1994 was a massive event, and so some of us now are talking about the wreckages of utopia– that we’re living in an aftermath, and how that’s a very productive place to be. We live in the aftermath of third-worldism, post-independence Africa, and post-apartheid. Huge stories which all, in some ways, failed. It’s this sense of living in the ruins of those big ideas where you’re finding fragments of the future. f) New York, June 1981 : The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report five homosexual men who have a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems. These are the first recognized cases of AIDS.

WE ! Cycles II Indira DAF Chess Affective Computing Blitz Boy George. John Galliano ; Lady Di Psycho Psycho II Psycho III William Burroughs

about. There is scant evidence that practices existed of organising material in sequence, and part of these were known as Projections, believed to have been a form of repetitive shadow dance involving contemporary gods, which were then displayed to attendant worshippers, distinguished by their craven, passive nature. Chris Petit b) Memphis On the night of December 11, 1981, drunk in a friend’s apartment in Milan, Ettore Sottsass and a group of fellow designers decide to form a collective. After listening to a Bob Dylan song about Memphis blues, they decide that they will adopt the name of the birthplace of rock-androll and the ancient seat of the Pharaohs. Unenthused by the prospects of designing another drab office chair, they resolve to design like mutating bacteria, infecting, adapting, proliferating, throwing a wrench in the order of things. The haphazard and affective beauty of their objects evidences the true power of the Memphis Group’s consciously ambivalent stance towards the rules of functionalism. d) Jacques Lacan : “The death instinct is only the mask of the symbolic order.” e) Mozartbique Karl : In 1786, shortly before the storm on the Bastille and the French revolution Da Ponte and Mozart wrote the Figaro. As of Figaro Mozart was himself a servant. Marianne : A servant who loved masked balls and who had a different identity every week. Karl : Everything being a lie, turns into everything being the truth. f) All Then/ Žižek, 2048, October, the originality of the simian deity may be traced back to a fragment which resists interpretation in any contemporary context : a sublime moment outside the space of narrative comes when Keitel tries to start an unfamiliar car and the radio blasts out Mickey’s Monkey by the Miracles and an intransigent De Niro dances wildly on the other side of the windshield [fragment ; origin unknown] It is possible that Mickey’s Monkey may be a reference to Althen or All Then because Mickey is thought to have been a variation of the name Michael, and the scene needs to be read as some form of worship to the Althen or All Then cult. Chris Petit

Okay. Art. 2081 a) Everything okay. It is all okay. Art ? Okay !

Eric B. Mitchell d) Artists are interesting people with dull ideas, while scientists are dull people with interesting ideas. Bruce Sterling

Capitalism

a) “If we want to fight Capitalism there must be another form of discipline and solidarity, which is not fascist.” Slavoj Zizek b) “Sonne statt Reagan”, Joseph Beuys c) “It wasn’t supposed to be the Schumann’s ; I never wanted that name.” Charles Schumann d) “Junk is the ideal product… the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.” William Burroughs

History

a) Raging Bull was in post-production throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 1980. The sound mix alone took six months. According to Winkler, while Scorsese was editing, United Artists was quietly trying to sell the picture, but none of the studios would touch it. b) “Bearing in mind that generations in all historical periods have come to this moment : It’s the end, it’s a projection really of death. You project it on to the next generation because it is hard to bear for yourself.” Christopher Bollas c) Rugor Nass the stout and stern leader kept a tight rein on Gungan affairs, continuing a longstanding custom of isolationism. Ages ago, a cultural misunderstanding led to a quarrel between the Gungan and the Naboo colonists. This tension was eternalized by pigheadedness and ignorance on both sides. As of the Battle of Naboo, Otoh Gunga was home to a million Gungans, living in a massive bubble city, an area now known as the Ancient Quarter. d) “The moment you say ‘post’, suddenly you’re right back in the middle of whatever it was you were trying to separate yourself from. I never understood why postmodernism was called postmodernism. It was just a really ugly moment in modernism. You can certainly say ‘post 9/11’… ‘post’ as a concept only seems to work with ordinal time, not cardinal time or notions that exist outside of temporal sequencing.” Douglas Coupland e) Whose metaphors ? A term by Harry G. West, the great anthropologist. He researched at the Mueda plateau in northern Mozambique, where the Makonde live. According to the Makonde, sorcerers remake the world by asserting the authority of their own imaginative visions of it. Yes ! A key idea for West is that one sorcerer’s claims can be reversed by other sorcerers. He realized that ethnography and sorcery have much in common. Yes again ! (And history.)

AIDS

a) Françoise Barré-Sinoussi I We came to Paris to meet the grand Françoise Barré-Sinoussi at the institut Pasteur. Mme Barré Sinoussi is a Nobel laureat (2008, with Luc Montagnier), a bio-chemist and a long-time player in the science thriller that pinned Robert Gallo of the United States against a French team around Luc Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi. The year was 1983, on both sides of the Atlantic scientists were frantically working to solve the same problem, the same puzzling, frightening question : Why were people dying of this new disease ? What was this new disease ? And what did all this have to do with sex ? With gays ? With a certain lifestyle, a permissiveness, a freedom ? It was in 1980 that the first rumors developed, it was in 1980 that the way people thought about sex changed forever, it was in 1980 that sex was paired with fear, with deadly fear. It was in 1980 that Gaetan Dugas, a FrenchCanadian steward, flew here and there and fucked everywhere. He was later called Patient Zero,

Answer(s) of the Real a) to go ? b) Surrounding the Saturn-Jupitur conjunction, 1981 : April 12, 1981 : Launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia. May 13, 1981 : The contract killer Ali Agca fires at Pope John Paul II, who will survive the assassination attempt and will attribute his survival to Mary’s protection. Not only did he bend down to a girl with the image of the Virgin, but the assassination attempt also took place on the anniversary of the first Marian apparition in Fátima, Portugal. May 28, 1981 : The Pope witnesses a “dance of the sun” above Rome like the one three shepherds’ children witnessed in Fátima on October 13, 1917 – proof of the Virgin Mary. c) is there WiFi ? d) Jacques Lacan spoke of the ‘answer of the real’, which is found by the one who pursues unflinchingly the reasons for his destiny. (The Answer of the Real aligns prophecy with reality ; it is conspiracy theories, the Last Judgment, extraterrestrials, the Theory of Everything. Answers that interest us, but these answers also are, to paraphrase Slavoj Žižek, symptoms and traces of a future truth.) Ecco a) “Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books : it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. The Name of the Rose, 1980 b) etcfunction c) “The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.” The Name of the Rose, 1980

The Human League

a) Dare : “Darkness, darkness” b) Bob Last : “They were quite schizophrenic about all these issues, about commerce and selling out.” c) Jon Savage : “ “You could say that Fast Product stands at just the point where Postmodernism fully moved into popular culture.” d) In January 1980, Deng Xiaoping delivers a public apology for the actions of the Gang of Four during the period known as the Cultural Revolution, entitled, “The Present Situation and the Tasks Before Us.” “We have settled accounts with the Gang of Four and launched a nationwide campaign to uncover their factional set-up and to expose and criticize their crimes. “The residual influence of the Gang of Four is still being felt in the organizational and ideological fields, and we must not underestimate its harmfulness or we are likely to make mistakes. “We want to make use of foreign funds and technology and to actively expand our foreign trade, but we must rely primarily on our own efforts. We are opposed to those absurd, reactionary concepts of impoverished socialism, transition in poverty to a higher stage, and making revolution in poverty touted by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. But we are also opposed to the idea of turning China into a so-called welfare state right now, because that’s impossible.” e) Bob Last : “The environment was complicated then. The Mekons, the Gang of Four, and Scritti Politti were self-consciously politically engaged. The Human League came out of a different scene in Sheffield which was much more industrial working class and did not approve of the art school engagement with theory. They had an old-fashioned socialist understanding. So Scritti, when they came to me, knew that I was theoretically engaged, but also knew that I liked Top of the Pops and knew how to sell people out. It was very much a commercial proposition.

places I have lived. I haven’t seen it in Africa.

American

Capitalism II

that the price uncertainties were temporary and avoided making any adjustments. Mexican debt looked more and more unreliable. The fixed pesodollar exchange rate became unsustainable. The president still insisted on keeping it fixed, “I will defend the peso like a dog !” he famously said in August 1981. Six months later the peso was deva-

Thang 5. The Human League, Being Boiled 6. Siouxsie & the Banshees, Israel 7. Der Plan, Geri Reig & Da Vorne Steht ‘Ne Ampel 8. Kraftwerk, Home Computer 9. Blondie, Rapture 10. Spandau Ballet, To Cut a Long Story Short b) Doug Aitken’s 80*81 list of dead musicians John Lennon - Senselessly Murdered During Resurgence AC/DC’s Bon Scott Dies from Alcohol Poisoning Joy Division - Suicide of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis Led Zeppelin - Disbands After Drummer John Bonham Dies Darby Crash of the Germs (LA band)- Dies of an intentional heroin overdose Bob Marley - Dies from cancer Steve Peregrin Took of T. Rex/Inner City Unit -Asphyxication after inhaling a cocktail cherry Steve Currie of T. Rex - Dies in a car crash on the way back to his home in Valle de Parra, Portugal Bill Haley - Dies from a brain tumor Mike Bloomfield of Electric Flag - Found dead of a drug overdose in his car ; died at a party and was driven to another location by two men present at the party c) Arno Brandlhuber’’s 80*81 architecture playlist Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, California, 1980 by Philip Johnson Forest Showroom BEST, Richmond, Virginia, 1980 by James Wines / S.I.T.E. Jacob & Anna Harder House, Mountain Lake, Minnesota, 1980 by Bruce Goff Kanchanjunga Apartments, Bombay, 1970-1983 by Charles Correa Les Espaces d’Abraxas, Marne-la-Vallée, 19781983 by Ricardo Bofill NCDC-Office Building, New Delhi, 1978-1980 by Kuldip Singh with Mahendra Raj Parterre Apartment Building, Daimiel, Spain, 19781982 by Miguel Fisac Schlangenbader Straße, Berlin, 1980 by Georg Heinrichs, Gerhard Krebs and Klaus Krebs SESC Pompéia, Sao Paulo, 1977-1986 by Lina Bo Bardi Sports Center, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 1980 by Frei Otto

a) Slavoj Žižek : “I really mean it : My whole effort is to remain at the surface. I don’t believe in depth. If you deeply look into a person–in everyone–you find shit. I believe in surface. I think true metaphysics is the metaphysics of surface.”

Africa

a) Get the latest African news : breaking news, features, analysis and special reports plus audio and video from across the African… b) Sarah Nuttall “It seems as if it is always speaking to the outside, because the outside has so powerfully determined what Africa is. That play between tradition and modernity comes from African thinkers themselves, but very often in the context of a geopolitical environment which is about finding funding, getting money, trying to project a particular version of the continent in order to achieve particular kinds of geopolitical or financial ends. It’s a fairly fraught conversation. What’s been really interesting about the work that Achille Mbembe and I did on Johannesburg, is the effort to identify an African metropolitan space and assert it in its fully ‘Afropolitan’ potential. c) Sarah Nuttall II What do you recall from your teenage years in Hillbrow ? What’s your image of the city then ? Hanging out on the street, going to Pink Floyd concerts, going to movies and having my purse stolen, hanging out in music shops, reading feminist books that I couldn’t get here but were somehow infiltrating that space, having secret meetings. Secret meetings ? Antiapartheid ? Yeah, around the political struggle, talking about the release of Mandela. Was there a vision of change ? Massive, by 1980, 1981 it was massive. The 1970s were deeply depressed, but the political movement, the ANC and UDF, was really gaining massive ground by the early 1980s. And by 1985 there was a kind of certainty that we would get rid of these people. We had a massive political push then. The whole story of the 1980s is very powerful. d) Achille Mbembe It’s like a window that’s opened into a space we imagine was there, of which you are not even aware of, and the sun we see recedes into another future horizon and forces us to go after. Translated into the real, it is a certain source I have never seen before, and I’ve lived in many places, but I’ve not seen it in the

Gigolo

e) This is the gayest non-gay movie ever made. This is a homosexual-heterosexual conspiracy. This is sex as asthetics. This is color in the place of emotion. This is surface and sound. We can still feel it today. We live in a world that was defined by it. c) Giorgio Moroder GM : The only thing I really like is the song. CR : Call Me. GM : Blondie. The score is very typical, synthesizer and all these. d) Paul Schrader II “After the 1960s and 1970s we were in for kind of a cool Classicism to come back and this is how I wanted to dress this character. Richard said he didn’t believe me, but that I was absolutely right.” f) The year is 1980. Anything goes. Sex is for free. Sex is without fear. But not for very much longer. It is the year of patient Number One, it is a year before the world learns of Aids. But now is now. Who cares about tomorrow. The car. The body. Blondie. It all came together at that magic moment.

a) 1/4 oz brandy, 3/4 oz ruby port, 3/4 oz orange juice, Champagne b) While most memories are specific to individuals, there are memories that are shared by entire groups of people who are homogeneous for social, ethnic and cultural characteristics or are connected by a common experience of a given event. The social nature of these collective memories is testified not only by their content, but also by the way in which they are fabricated. Stefania de Vito, Roberto Cubelli, Sergio Della Sala c) Bob Last : Thatcher immediately said, We draw the line between people who want to work and keep the state functioning and people who are mad or who are ill. 80*81 : Bands like the Gang of Four thought the revolution would come true ? Bob Last : It was an extremely politicized environment in which all these stylistic decisions were being made. The reason we were able to do what we did with the Human League was because they were operating more instinctively. The problem that the Gang of Four and the Mekons had was that, although their theoretical understanding allowed them to think strategically, it also, at a certain point, inhibited them from engaging with a

lued from twenty to seventy pesos per dollar. Francisco Cortina “The Life of Christina the Astonishing”, 2081 by Victoria Nelson : a) We celebrate this humble shepherd girl born fifty years after the Great Miasma who came back from the dead to perform countless miracles, died a second time and returned again, and rose in reputation to become the most revered of holy women in all the western lands. b) That dream, I decided, not the book, was Jacob’s gift to me. c) Come, O come, my life’s delight ! Let me not in languor pine ! Love loves no delay ; thy sight The more enjoyed, the more divine ! O come, and take from me The pain of being deprived of thee ! Come, then, and make thy flight

As swift to me as

Opera

a) This is it. The eleventh and last book. We traveled for one year. We met old friends, we made a lot of new friends. We realized things. This was about knowledge, about cognition, about perception – and, yes, it was about enlightenment. This is why it had to end in Rishikesh. b) C.G. Jung believed that events could be causally unrelated yet connected in a meaningful manner. The physicist believed that events had an effect on each other if there was a physical correlation that grouped them by causality. In classic causality the world is interconnected like clockwork ; every event affects another. And then there is quantum causality, which is statistic causality. When an atomic nucleus disintegrates you get a large number of nuclei, and suddenly one disintegrates, and then another. According to the law of decay you can prove that these events are completely uncorrelated–no force or communication between the nuclei, they simply disintegrate. But because macroscopically they do have a decay curve, you could think that they are following some kind of law and it’s statistically relevant. And then there was a third opinion suggesting that events could be connected by meaning. Telepathy would fall into that category. Karl von Meyenn c) Georg met Hortensia Völckers by chance at a dinner. A year later we proposed this idea of 80*81 to her for the Kulturstiftung des Bundes. She liked it but said we would have to make it more visible, which in fact conformed to what we wanted because we’d always had in mind to end with an opera. The film set in the Grande Hotel is now called Mozartbique and has a lot of masks in it – not African, but Star Wars and Fantômas, Frankenstein and Bunny. Our idea is to develop the idea of the opera. We asked René Pollesch if he would help us with performance evenings in different theatre houses, to compile a dramaturgic progress from a congrès en miniature into a play or an opera with a beginning, middle and end. Like almost everyone

b) Sarah Nuttall : “If you watch BBC, CNN or Sky News, you never see Africans in business suits. You barely see the city as city, or the Afropolitan potential of a place like this.”

g) American Gigolo, thirty years on. Schrader is directing one dark movie after another. Moroder is making music for the Olympics (one after the other), Scarfiotti died of Aids very early on. The Calvinist from Rapid Springs, Michigan, going through the eternal cycle of sin and redemption without any hope of Hollywood hailing the king. The workoholic from Ortisei, Südtirol, just doing what he is doing and changing the way the world dances and does the things it does to music. The hedonist from Milan, Italy, creating a Los Angeles that never was.

Diez / Roth

mass audience. 80*81 : Damaged Goods was a hit, right ? Bob Last : Well, it wasn’t really. d) Mexico (and Luis Barragán) : It was a rather short-lived abundance. At the end of 1980, the international interest rates climbed from 8% to 20%, and foreign debt automatically exploded. López Portillo felt confident that a foundation built on oil was strong enough to weather the storm. However, in June 1981, the price of oil started to shake as Saudi Arabia offered a discount from thirty-six dollars to four dollars per barrel. Stubbornly, the Mexican authorities believed

2081

heavenly light ! Playlists

a) DJ Hell’s 80*81 Playlist 1. Fehlfarben, Herrenreiter 2. Grace Jones, Warm Leatherette 3. David Bowie, Fashion 4. Heaven 17, We Don’t Need This Fascist Groove

we talked to, Mr. Pollesch liked the idea. In a way we will try to put things back together to have one story line, one plot and one ending. One or two Grand Narratives, one or two Plateaux. We will stage the opera in Munich on New Year’s Eve 2010. d) Today, the following terms have lost their meaning and therefore are prohibited : Filet Mignon, Mehrfachbelastung, Dramaturg, Vatertag and ZDF. We were able to decipher the meaning of the following terms and they are allowed again : Summa Summarum, alchemist, Thüringen, and Schönrechnen. Around the year 2037 the American continent had been completely abandoned. The cities, once full of life, were now silent and empty. With the consent of our European partners, the President, the Supreme Court and the Congress established an American government in exile in West-Berlin. Nothing is true and nothing is permitted.

d) Was the Soviet Union afraid of the Pope ? Jean-Louis Bruguièere : No. The plan was to discredit the Kremlin. Attacking the Pope would be a huge scandal. In fact, they only wanted to make a small leak in order to point out internationally that the operation had come from the Soviet Union. Planning to assassinate the Pope was the worst

We believe America is practicing all kinds of terrorism against Libya. Even the accusation that we are involved in terrorism is in itself an act of terrorism. Q By the way, have you read the novel The Fifth Horseman, in which you figure as an apocalyptic nuclear terrorist ? A Yes, but I mock such ridiculous fiction.

new in the world today ? When you become involved in politics, what is ‘new’ is what’s in the morning paper. But the paper transmits news without reporting what is actually new. What was new in the twentieth century was the end of agriculture, and the prolonging of life expectancy. The rest is history, and in the end it was less important.

b) Russia’s super rich - Top 10 overview* 1 Wladimir Lissin, 54 28,3 Billions(+ 9,5 Billions) 2 Michail Prochorow, 45 22,7 Billions(+ 4,85 Billions) 3 Alischer Usmanow, 57 19,9 Billions(+ 7,5 Billions) 4 Oleg Deripaska, 43 19 Billions(+ 5,2 Billions 5 Roman Abramowitsch, 44 17,1 Billions(+ 0,1 Billions) 6 Alexej Mordaschow, 45 17,05 Billions(+ 7,05 Billions) 7 Suleiman Kerimow, 44 16,9 Billions(+ 2,4 Billions) 8 Michail Fridman, 46 16 Billions(+ 1,7 Billions) 9 Wladimir Potanin, 50 14,3 Billions(+ 4,35 Billions) 10 Wagit Alekperow, 60 10,9 Billions(+ 0,25 Billions) *in US dollars

b) Paul Schrader : “Richard Gere walks into this big pink vagina. But he actually enters the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

The Gipper a) Dave Eggers : He is the model for all Republicans, you have to worship at the altar of Reagan if you are a Republican, there is not a single Republican in the 20th century who is seen with the same reverance. He was the purest conservative, he was suspicious of the power of government, he believed in self-reliance, he had a fulltime American upbringing, in Illinois actually, not far from where I grew up. His personality, his story, his ability to keep conservative values very simple and make them pure–even when Obama was campaigning he said something positive about Reagan as a communicator. The changes were lasting ? Dave Eggers : His campaign in 1980 was about ‘Morning in America,’ about a new start. There was a malaise that was going on after Carter, the Iranian hostages, gas prices, and stagflation. Reagan had an optimism that connected to something at the core of a lot of people in this country, an optimism that is part of our DNA. b) Paul Schrader : “We were scouting locations for Cat People in New Orleans. It came on the radio that Reagan had been shot by this kid from Colorado. They described a little bit about him and I said to the driver, It’s one of these Taxi Driver kids. I knew these kids because I used to be one of them with all this anger that young males have. I got back to the hotel and the FBI were waiting because Hinckley had mentioned Jody Foster. They were remarkably efficient. This was two hours later. They wanted to know, Is it one person who is involved or are there more ? So the first thing they were doing was reaching out to anybody who might have come across this guy : Did you ever… ? Yes I did !” b) Who was this Mr. Reagan ? also known as Dutch, Bonzo, The Gipper, aka Bill Clinton, aka The Cowboy from Brooklyn or the man from General Electric. He was violent. He was misfortune. Mr. Reagan was the Cowboy from Brooklyn. Violence was capitalism, money was power, Reagan was cowboy. Capitalism is prohibited. Money is prohibited. Cowboy is prohibited. Nothing is true and nothing is permitted. Money was harm, Reagan was money. Money is not permitted, money is evil.

The Fall of the Soviet Union

c) Our favorite Paul Schrader films 1. Cat People 2. Mishima : A Life in Four Chapters 3. American Gigolo 4. Light Sleeper 5. Affliction 6. The Comfort of Strangers 7. Dominion : Prequel to the Exorcist 8. The Walker 9. Auto Focus 10. Adam Resurrected

2081

scandal possible. Did the Soviet GRU military intelligence work with Solidarność in Poland directly ? Jean-Louis Bruguièere : Who knows ? It was a very sensitive situation. The Soviets didn’t fear John Paul II ? They didn’t think that he would be more dangerous alive than dead ? Jean-Louis Bruguièere : No. He was a symbol. The Pope was very important and he was Polish. It was not something against the Pope himself or what he presented at the time. e) In June 1981, in Medjugorje, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, a vision of the Virgin Mary appears to six children. Over the next week the woman will reveal herself as the Virgin Mary and appear before growing number of believers to deliver messages and answer questions posed to her by the faithful. The Communist government is first alarmed at the religious revival and takes repressive measures but will later defend the supernatural apparitions as being true. Medjugorje will become one of the most popular pilgrimage sites for Catholics in the world. The Young-Girl knows no other legitimacy but that of the Spectacle. Inasmuch as the Young-Girl is

History 2 a) It is now that the live footage of Italian TV goes into slow motion. The cameras stop. The technicians wonder. John Paul II is about 15 feet away from Ali Agca. b) More than ever we believe that history works in cycles. Maybe we have to see it like a clock. If it was nine o’’clock back then it is three o’clock now. It looks like we are on the other side of the circle. c) Thomas Hertog : “So if there is a history in which Napoleon won the war, you can condition on Napoleon having won the war and ask for something like, how would historical records repeat that history ? You will find a different historical record and compare it to how Napoleon lost the war. You specify the observational context. Then you select a different set of histories of the universe compared to what I specify as a situation in which Napoleon lost the war. Further predictions based on this condition will turn out to be different and therefore testable. You as local observer can ask many different questions. If Napoleon had won the war, what will I see in this and that ? It’s a very dynamical process, there’s not our a priori history. Depending on the question you ask, you select a different history for

f) Achille Mbembe : The past is a force, it’s a potent force in the sense that it doesn’t just go away naturally. Some work has to be done : cultural, social, political work. If that work is not done, the past as a force tends to reassert itself in the present and the future. On May 13, Mehmet Ali Agca the right-wing extremist is writing postcards in Saint Peter’s Square, Rome, when John Paul II arrives. The Pope spots a small girl in the crowd holding a picture of the Appearance of the Virgin Mary at Fátima. At that moment Ali Agca fi res two shots at the Pope’s head just as he bends down to the girl. The bullets miss. But the next two hit the Pope’s body and injure him seriously. He will survive and pardon Ali Agca from the Gemelli clinic. Two years later he will visit Agca in prison and Agca will ask him about ‘that queen’ that saved his life. John Paul II will attribute his survival to Mary’s protection : not only did he bend down to the girl with the image of the Virgin, but the assassination attempt also took place on the anniversary of the fi rst Marian apparition at Fátima. Agca will later call himself the ‘reincarnated Christ’ and ask for Polish citizenship after his release from prison in 2010.

a) What happened ? It is the year 2081 and we have forgotten everything. Men are forbidden, drama is forbidden, democracy is forbidden. There are rules, laws, algorithms, but there is no memory left, no history. Then, in South Africa, in India, in Brazil, fragments are discovered, which point to something that used to exist. Archives, hard discs, books, knowledge. We have to put the pieces together. b) As Yoda says in Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back : “Hard to see, always in motion, the future”. c) Part of the problem goes back to one man. The Frenchman, Jean-Francois Lyotard. Around the year 1980 Lyotard stated that there are different narratives. More than one history. No grandnarratives, but many small ones. Lytoard invented relativism. Lytoard was bad luck. Lytoard corrupted our thinking. Lyotard was playing with the minds of us… humans. We have overcome this relativism. d) 2081 we see more clearly. Today we know. Today we celebrate. It is 100 years ago. Today is the anniversary of the Grand Transition. Breathe in, breathe out. This page : Jean Luc Godard, North Against South or Birth (of the Image) of a Nation, December 1979. Opposite page : INTERVIEW MAGAZINE, February 1980, featuring Tatum O’Neal. Courtesy Interview Inc. Change Bob Last : 1980 and 1981, from the point of view of British culture, was postpunk. It was one of these moments that was about being after the previous one. I don’t think it had its own identity until later in the 1980s, and I suppose there was a sense of crisis, it was very simply visible : there was rubbish on the streets, there were power outages, that kind of thing. Punk was confusing. Obviously you had people like Malcolm McLaren, and to a lesser degree myself, who were very immersed in Situationist thinking, and I suppose in one way or another we saw this as a moment where an increased rate of change was possible. I thought there was a moment where you could make change happen much faster than normal.

As Yoda says in Star Wars. The Empire Strikes Back : “Hard to see, always in motion, the future.”

a) Now here is a field from the village of Fátima in Portugal. Can you believe it ? Mr. Wilson brought it over piece by piece. Don’t tell the Fátimans because they have no idea. The entire thing was removed, the ground was resodded and they’re none the wiser. Did it all very late at night. But out there is the actual field where three Portugese children, Lucia, Jacintha and Francisco were tending their sheep when they were visited by the Virgin Mary on May 13, 1917. b) Why is that date important ? Because on May 13, 1981, in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, on the 64th anniversary of the day that Our Lady of Fátima first visited the shepherd children in that field, John Paul II was visited by Mehmet Ali Agca who attempted to assassinate him. c) He touches his side. Blood runs down his fingers. Two bullets strike him in the stomach, one in his right arm, the fourth hits his little finger.

docile under the arbitrary rule of THEM, she is tyrannical when it comes to the living. Her submission to the impersonality of the Spectacle is what acquires for her the right to submit anyone else to it. Tiqqun The Fifth Horseman a) Monday, June 08, 1981 Excerpts from a Time Magazine interview with Colonel Muammar alGaddafi Q What is your attitude toward violent acts carried out against often innocent bystanders to a political struggle ? A I oppose localized incidents such as aircraft hijacking and hostage taking. But they are nothing compared with the terrorism America is practicing.

your answer. d) In the plot of J. G. Ballard’s Hello America, the Apollo Expedition to the Bering Strait comes across survivors from the previous expedition thirty years earlier. One of these survivors has taken to calling himself President Charles Manson, but none of the Apollo’s crew gets the reference because the Manson killings occurred 120 years earlier in a completely different world.

2081

Michel Serres : The philosophers who pretended to be contemporary were not contemporary. The question that always preoccupied me was, What is

Playlists II

a) 80*81 Playlist by Bob Last Contort Yourself – James White and the Blacks Lady Scarface – Lydia Lunch I’m Bored – Iggy Pop Don’t Look Down – Iggy Pop Drop The Bomb – Trouble Funk Rapture – Blondie Jezebel Spirit – Brian Eno and David Byrne Double Dutch Bus – Frankie Smith 96 tears – Question Mark and The Mysterions Manifesto – Roxy Music

Revolution a) ABOL HASSAN BANISADR Q What is your name ? A My name is Abol Hassan Bani Sadr. Ali was the fourth Caliph of the Sunnites, the first Imam of the Shiites. His son was called Hassan, and the father of Hassan was called Abol Hassan. He is a holy man for the Muslims. Q What is your profession ? A I was the first President of the Republic of Iran.

Q Is it still your title ? A Well, you have to be elected by the people. This is not an honourable title. It symbolizes the relation between a people and a person. Once the people have voted, the person that gets the majority becomes President. Q When was the last time that you were in Iran ? A I left in August 1981. Q Why ? A There had been a coup against me in June. The religious judges came to the verdict without holding a trial : I had to be executed on seven counts. I thought about staying in Iran or leaving the country to unveil the secret relationship that at that time existed between the President of the United States and those in Iran who were behind the coup against me. After I had left I did uncover this organic relationship between Mr. Khomeini and Mr. Reagan. Q Did the Mujahideen help you to get out ? A Yes, first I had to hide in Teheran, then a military plane was organized. I was wearing a uniform myself. The plane took off from a military base in Teheran and brought me to France. b) October Surprise II Abol Hassan Bani Sadr : From the beginning of the hostage taking the Reagan-Bush-clan tried to make contact. Mr. Khomeini had asked a representative of Mr. Carter : “If we give you the hostages, what’s in it for us ? What are you going to give us ? Arms, ammunition ?” And the representative went : “After all of this, do you really expect us to give you guns.” So Mr. Khomeini negotiated with the other side. And out came the October surprise. Q Five or six minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President the hostages were released. A Just after Mr. Reagan’s last word. Q So the whole world could see. Like Hollywood. Whose script was it ? A It was arranged. Q Were you part of the negotiations ? A Not at all. Q But you were President. A Officially, yes. But this was not official ; so I was not informed. c) What did you make of the Iranian Revolution ? (Don DeLillo laughs) : A neighbor of ours in Athens was an Armenian painter who lived in Iran and had to flee and was very bitter. I was stopped by police more than once just for walking past the American School of Archeology in Athens and they would stop me and question me not knowing I was American. For you these were times that held everything you were interested in later. Programmatic times. Don DeLillo : Yes. What’s that old Chinese saying about interesting times–that you’re better off not living in interesting times ? Interesting in the sense of dangerous. It’s much more elegantly stated.

Drugs

a) CR : How much did you do ? Paul Schrader : Like with any drug, your tolerance grows. CR : How much ? PS : You take more and more. CR : And sometimes you would go back to zero ? PS : (thinks for some seconds) No, the interesting thing about cocaine is that your body remembers where you left off. I don’t know why. If you got yourself onto a gram a day, taking a gram a day for two years and you cold turkey-ed and you were six months without it and say, Okay I’m gonna start up again ! But start up how I did two years ago doing a line every Saturday. Uh uh, your body says. No ! We remember… There is a chemical memory of where we were. A gram a day. (laughs) CR : Has a gram a day the same reaction as a line ? PS : You just have to take more to get the buzz. CR : I mean, is it still an upper ? PS : Yeah, but then because you take more it downs. GD : Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the end took four or five grams a day. PS : And that downs. A line or two is not much of a down. With a gram or two a day that next day you have a crash. The crash is really…You know, it’s like fuck ! It’s like bam ! Not like a hangover. It’s a depression. That is when your psychological problems come. To get out of depression you take more. On January 6 1980, ‘Global Positioning System’ GPS time epoch begins at 00 :00 UTC. On June 1, 1980 The Cable News Network (CNN) is officially launched at 00 :01 am.

On August, 1, 1980, MTV goes on air with Video Kills the Radio Star by Trevor Horn’s Buggles Jimmy Carter a) On January 7, 1980 President Carter signs a legislation approving $1.5 billion in loan gua-

straddle the two worlds a little because of the scale of my work and maybe because of the directness. I kind of got lumped, because my work was as big as a Schnabel painting. Someone like David Salle realized that money was on the other side and went from the conceptual edge to become more expression-y. I’ve always viewed him as

how to become iconic then his life has been a waste. We become our name. I have spent my life becoming my name so that it would somehow protect the radiant child it has been created to arm. In Gwangju, South Korea, military troops fire into a crowd demonstrating for democracy. Between 140 and 2,000 protesters die in an hour and a

Beckett a) Gilles Deleuze writes,“Quad is the exhausted.” He makes a distinction between ‘le fatigue’ the tired, and ‘l’epuise’ the depleted, the exhausted. “The tired can no longer achieve, but the exhausted can no longer ‘possibilize’… there is no more possible.” Exhausting space. Anyspace-whatever, l‘espace quelconque, an expression from his book The MovementImage : a singular space, which has lost its homogeneity, its metric proportions, so that an indefinite variety of connections become possible. A space of virtual conjunction, “grasped as pure locus of the possible.” b) Ohio Imprompto : So the sad tale a last time told they sat on as though turned to stone. Through the single window dawn shed no light. From the street no sound of reawakening. Or was it that buried in who knows what thoughts they paid no heed ? To light of day. To sound of reawakening. Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone. The sad tale a last time told. Nothing is left to tell. c) Samuel Beckett in Room 604 of The Hyde Park Hotel London, 1980. Photo by John Minihan. d) “To be sure, a global space is exhausted by the simple power of a fixed camera, immobile and continuous, operating with a zoom.”

Ships

rantees to bail out the Chrysler Corporation. b) October Surprise Abol Hassan Bani Sadr : There is Robert Parry, who came to the conclusion about the people who organized the hostage taking. It was like a machine of rage. Kissinger used the rage of the students when he prepared his plan. Q The students did not know ? A Even today they don’t know. The whole plan went on until the US election in 1980. There was a deal in Paris between the representatives of Mr. Khomeini and Reagan-Bush – Bush père. The October Surprise. Q Did you know about this at the time ? A Sure. One day before the election I said that an arrangement had been made so Mr. Reagan would win and Mr. Carter would lose. The President of the Iranian Parliament Alī Akbar Hāschemī Rafsandschani joked that we made Ronald Reagan President of the United States.

someone who goes over to the other side.”

The Picture Generation a) One of the protagonists of the Picture Generation who turned the art world upside-down in the early 1980s is Robert Longo. With Cindy Sherman, Jack Goldstein and Richard Prince, he replaced the establishment. In opposition to another group,

New York a) Eric Mitchell The Warhol world was imprinting itself onto our world. The conjunction of Fassbinder, Warhol and the history of New York made Underground USA happen. People like Jackie Curtis. He was such a wonderful person, he was an icon– I use the word too much. He was a drag queen and he was James Dean. In the song Walk on the Wild Side he was James Dean for a day. I was trying to take these elements of historical reality and re-transpose them into a movie that would be set today. I would adapt everything to what I thought was reality. c) Paul Schrader I know the kind of lineage of Gigolo. Not only was it very ‘Warholian’ – ironically we are in the Chelsea Hotel – Andy Warhol had a lot to do with it. Interview magazine championed it. Andy loved it and once Andy started talking about it, it became kind of a Studio 54 film, that whole crowd. It was the magazine that set the trend in motion. b) Eric Mitchell II At the time, New York had an amazing connection with Germany. For me personally it was Rainer Werner Fassbinder. There was a fascination

which Mr. Longo refers to as ‘the Schnabels’, the Replacement Generation comes from a strictly conceptual tradition : b) “There was the group that I hung around with, Cindy, Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, even David Salle to a certain extent and Richard Prince. We were about what art could be. And there was the other group that was all about expressionist painting, Julian Schnabel, and Anselm Kiefer and even Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz. They were about what art was. They focused on that traditional bullshit, the artist as the mystic. A drip on a piece of canvas has some deep fucking meaning because it comes from God. Later I was able to

between New York and Berlin. Both cities were in crisis. Financial crisis had already been here, and Berlin was in that weird situation. d) René Ricard The iconic representation of the artist, in manifestations from sublime to tedious, sublime in Manzoni and Warhol through the tedium of Byars and Beuys, authorship as object, is the precedent for the legitimacy of the Tag. This is the individual as archetype, where we order a “Bud,” where every bleach blonde is called “Blondie,” the Tag name for the individual Deborah Harry. If Andy Warhol can‘t be used as an object lesson in

Diez / Roth

2081

half. It will take more than a decade for democratic rule to return to South Korea. Hubert Fichte a) Es sollte die Geschichte der Kräuter werden. Die Bewegungen der Kräuter. Und es wurden doch wieder nur die Bewegungen der Menschen den Amazonas hinunter. Endlich die Bewegungen von Fingern auf Papier. Die Spuren der Tinte. Lettern. b) Regis : Debray spricht von Inkanation. Zu Weihnachten füttert Brigitte Bardot 1500 Hunde. Bundeskanzler Schmidt spielt mit Eschenbach und Justus Frantz und den Londoner Philharmonikern ein Klavierkonzert von Mozart. c) Schreiben für eine Welt, in der es keine Schrift mehr geben wird, keine Leser, wahrscheinlich keine Augen mehr. What happened on New Year’s Eve 1980 in the American Embassy in Teheran ? The Islamic Student Follower’s of the Imam’sLine have been holding 52 American hostages for 424 days. Mahmud Ahmadinedschad proposes to occupy the Russian Embassy as well, since the So-

viets are also fi ghting the allied Islamic Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, who later shift into alliance with Iraq in the war against Iran because they were not allowed to share in power. From Ahmadinedschad’s predecessor Abolhassan Banisadr, fi rst President of Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980, we would learn that the original idea for the hostage-taking came from Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and some relative of the Shah, in order to destabilize the country. The hostages are released six minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President in January 1981. Six minutes ? What a coincidence. The plot behind this is called October Surprise : arms supply in return for a postponement of the hostages’ release until after the election in October1980. Or : Fuck Jimmy Carter !

a) In 1980, Fidel Castro invited all Cubans to go to Mariel Harbor and take any of their friends or relatives to the United States. Some 125,000 Cubans take the offer and pour into the US. The Carter administration struggles to house and feed the invasion. Especially because Castro opened the prisons and madhouses. It all benefited Ronald Reagan’s election. A year later Miami had its biggest scandal : the ‘Cocain Cowboys’ controlled the drug market from the police departments. TIME magazine’s cover asked, Paradise Lost ? b) Mariel Boat-Lift by Hunter S. Thompson, from Songs of the Doomed : “The Silk Road” is a story about people who got caught in the fast and violent undercurrents and, finally, the core of the action of the great Cuba-toKey West Freedom Flotilla in the spring of 1980 – a bizarre and massively illegal “sea lift” which involved literally thousands of small private boats that brought more than 100,000 very volatile Cuban refugees to this country in less than three months and drastically altered the social, political, and economic realities of South Florida for the rest of this century. By 1980, the billion-dollar drugsmuggling industry and influx of Latin-American millionaire refugees had turned Miami into the Hong Kong of the Western World and the cash capital of the United States. It was also the nation’s murder capital, with a boomtown economy based on the smuggling of everything from drugs and gold bullion to guns and human beings. What Havana was to the 1950s, Marseilles to the ‘60s, and Bangkok to the ‘70s, Miami is to the ‘80s. The Freedom Flotilla began on April Fools Day. In less than two weeks the Coast Guard had abandoned all hope of stopping the boat traffic ; the port of Key West was overwhelmed, and any boat longer than fifteen feet was for sale or rent. Cubans from Miami roamed the bars and local docks with fistfuls of hundred dollar bills, and drug smugglers had already begun to take advantage of the general confusion and the helplessness of the Coast Guard. Not even the White House or the U.S. Marines could stop the tidal wave of Cubans pouring into South Florida. To accelerate the exodus of refugees already granted asylum at the Peruvian embassy in Havana, Castro put out the word : Miami’s Cubans could take out one relative for every four refugees taken from Cuba to America. The reaction of the Miami Cuban community was near hysteria. The 150-mile length of Highway A1A – from Key West to Miami – became strangled by a huge caravan of destitute refugees in busloads with blackedout windows, headed north ; and the southbound lane was jammed with Cuban Americans towing a strange armada of fiberglass speedboats, cabin cruisers, and ungainly fishing boats… All this in a constant frenzy of traffic through police and military roadblocks all along the way. c) Fraud of the Century / The Salem, formerly merly South Sun, Lema forsinks in one of the deepest trenches in the Atlantic off the coast of Guinea. Investigations by Lloyds will confi rm go was secretly sold that its carto SASOL, the South African Oil Company, in

breach of an embargo for 43 million dollars, and the ship scuttled. The tanker fi lled its tanks in Kuwait with oil owned by Shell, registered for delivery in France. En route to Europe the Salem stopped in Durban and off-loaded 180,000 tonnes of oil, then fi lled up with water in order to create the impression that it was still laden. The ship owner hopes to make an extra 24 million dollars off the insurance claim for the lost oil. A British Petrol ship rescues the shipwrecked sailors sitting in the lifeboats with their duty free purchases and sandwiches prepared for the trip. At least 25 countries are touched by the case, setting off 13 separate investigations and legal proceedings in the US, Greece, the Netherlands, Britain and Liberia. The only country in which no investigations or prosecutions will take place is South Africa. In 1984, the US court convicts the ship owner Frederick Ed Soutan, an American to 35 years imprisonment. One of the brains in this fraud, Anton Rijdel, is tried in Amsterdam. The incident will be traced back to Zug, Switzerland, a town with some 10,000 international companies, one for every two residents. d) Mariel Boat-Lift by Hunter S. Thompson “Calm down, Jocko,” I said. “We’re all friends here – you do your business and I’ll do mine.” “You bastard,” he hissed. “You’re worse than Skinner.” “Maybe,” I said. “What time is the game tonight ?” There was a long silence and then I heard him say, very faintly – “It’s delayed – eleven o’clock.” “Okay,” I said. “We’ll be there.” “We ?” “Yeah,” I said, “and if you see that welshing bastard Evans, tell him to bring money !” “What ?” “He owes me,” I said. “God damn !“ he said after a long pause. “You bastards are all Cubans, aren’t you ?” – Key West, 1980 e) ..we want to float with some friends on a sailboat on Lake Zurich, starting off in Bollingen, Carl Jung’s castle. In the words of Slavoj, our comrade from Ljubljana : “The unconscious is outside.” Yes ! Bottom-up, here we go.

drillard, On Nihilism, 1980 b) You also found a connection to the attack in 1980, on the Oktoberfest in Munich. Jean-Louis Bruguièere : We were sure that the terrorists of the Rue des Rosiers had contacts with the extreme right and the Nazi groups. The DGSE, the Diréction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure,

b) Party member Joseph Beuys previously founded the German Student Party in 1967, the Organization for Direct Democracy Through Referendum in 1971 and the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in 1974. From 1979 to 1980, Beuys has a huge retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York. He is at the

the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster the month before. As a is one of the founding members of the Baden-Württemberg section of the German Green Party Kretschmann has been part of the state parliament since 1980, in the constituency of Nürtingen. He is a Catholic and belongs to the Realpolitik-oriented, more conserva-

a) Poto and Cabengo, 1980, 73min. JP Gorin’s first solo feature after his Dziga Vertov Group collaboration with Jean-Luc Godard, this fascinating documentary examines the case of six-year old identical twin girls living in San Diego who were alleged by speech therapists to have invented their own language. Gorin shows up at the scene to document the mystery, but soon realizes that the real story lies within the social structure behind the whole affair. Set against the lowermiddle suburbia of a failed American ideal, the film investigates the complicity of a society which would not only willfully misunderstands the girls’ problem, but also exploit it for personal game. b) “When you wanted to sell your soul to the devil in the 1980s, the devil would really consider the bargain – there weren’t that many souls to sell. There weren’t that many souls on the market. After the 1980s it was a buyer’s market.

c) Wimbledon, England. America vs. Europe, Big Mac vs. Ice Borg.

The 1980, US Army Survival Manual (as performed by Anne Tismer) Water : • Place a small rock or similar item in the bag. • Close the bag and tie the mouth securely as close to the end of the bag as possible to keep the maximum amount of air space. If you have a piece of tubing, a small straw, or a hollow reed, insert one end in the mouth of the bag before you tie it securely. Then tie off or plug the tubing so that air will not escape. This tubing will allow you to drain out condensed water without untying the bag. • Place the bag, mouth downhill, on a slope in full sunlight. Position the mouth of the bag slightly higher than the low point in the bag. • Settle the bag in place so that the rock works itself into the low point in the bag.

the French external intelligence agency, passed me the information that two of the attackers had striking similarity to two German neo-Nazis, Walter Kexel and Odfried Hepp. Hepp was trained by Fatah in a camp in Lebanon, from June 1980 until July 1981. Their antisemitism and antizionism went well with the Palestinian movement. He called himself ‘Youssouf’ and tried to set up a PLO cell in Frankfurt. He is a strong suspect for the bombing in Munich that killed 13 people. Friends a) You have more friends on Facebook than you think b) Find more of your friends. The fastest way to find all of your friends on Facebook is importing your email contacts. Once you’ve imported your contacts you can view, manage or delete them at any time. c) Sympathy might be an unusual category for historic research, but for us it’s very effective. We sat down with Enki Bilal and Pierre Christin in Bilal’s studio near Les Halles in Paris. We talked about tennis and history and it made perfect sense. They came up with a character for us, Héloïse de Monasquiel, who will also appear in our theatre

height of his international success now. Two years later at the peak of the international arms race in 1982, Beuys will appear as a singer with Sonne statt Reagan (Sun instead of Reagan). c) Slavoj Žižek : “To really experience the ecological crisis you need to experience terror, which is the terror of losing ground. This is why I am against the simplistic idea of Mother Earth, which presupposes that we still have some ground to return to by restoring natural balance. In Lacanian terms, “No big other.” The true terror appears when you realize that there is nowhere to return to.” d) What color was 1980 and 1981 ? Oliviero Toscani : “Probably green. The Benetton logo, the green rectangle. I decided it had to be green, and then the Green Party and the environmental movement started. It was kind of a greenish decade. Through the 1980s it was this same damn color. I actually kind of like green because it’s a very difficult color.” e) CR : What is the color of American Gigolo ? Paul Schrader : Well… (there is a long pause) I can’t really say. No, I never think in these terms. I couldn’t say of any of my movies. CR : Is it true that Ferdinando Scarfiotti took a

tive wing of the Greens. b) “Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.” The New York Times, 2011 c) On the banks of the river Ganges a father pointed at the mask of Ronald Reagan and explained to his son that it was Bill Clinton. Everyone nodded, yes – including us. What if in a few years from now we will have trouble remembering ? And what if the so-called cyber wars pose a real threat to our data and knowledge ? We imagine most of it will be lost because some idiots tried to protect it. Outsource it into space and the knowledge mutates. Imagine these outsourced colonies of World’’s Memory form ulcers, and the deciphering of meaning becomes almost impossible. And then imagine they find the 80*81 files, our archive of threads, leitmotifs, and connections. And the conspiracy theories and historical insinuations. e) In 2081 they will celebrate 100 years of the Grand Transition of 1980 and 1981. You will see. You are invited.

Christin / Bilal a) Which rusting wrecks bang together in your senile heads ? b) The smell of a deceasing starfish. c) As reported by Pierre Christin and Enki Bilal, Héloïse de Monasquiel was connected to Action Directe, just after the group officially gained guerilla status. She was involved in a number of attacks, including the attempted assassination of a chief in the aeronautics industry. Héloïse de Monasquiel escaped the arrests of the rue Pergolèse in September 1980, where the group was to meet Carlos. After the election of François Mitterrand in 1981, and the vote for an amnesty law, the beautiful Héloïse de Monasquiel disappeared for more than 20 years, supposedly living in Southeast Asia. Oktoberfest a) In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station, the Oktoberfest in Munich : the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.) Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other terrorism, that of the system. There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality – no more stage either of mental or political solidarity : what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter ? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences). Jean Bau-

pieces, next to Ronald Reagan, Martina Navratilova or René Pollesch. Bilal and Christin work futurohistorically. They look at the present with a view from the future. So did J.G. Ballard. He was born in Shanghai, on the same street as Mei-Lun Xue, the designer of the first three 80*81 books. Her family moved to the US in 1990.

Colors

a) On January 13, 1980, the federal party Die Grünen is founded in Karlsruhe. It bills itself as “environmental, social, directly democratic and nonviolent.” The self-conception is that of an anti-party party.

German Löwenbräu can as a pattern for most of the light blue walls, the shirts and things ? PS : Yeah, yeah, that’s true. CR : That’s why I remember the film as Löwenbräu bluish.

d) In October 1981, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) wins a majority in Greek elections, forming the first socialist government. Problems of our Times (1981) : Keeping up with the Joneses. (The Seattle effect) Problems of our Times (2081) : Most people who have survived are stupid but feel fine. Breathe in, breathe out. (The Delhi effect)

a) Winfried Kretschmann is the first ever Green Minister-President in Germany. He was elected in the state of Baden-Württemberg in May 2011, in

Problems of our Times (2011) : Many people muddle up correlation and causation but still call themselves scientists. (The Vienna effect)

Cycles 2081

Jean-Pierre Gorin

This is what happened.” a) ”The eighties will see a great swing from military towards temple bureaucracy, from the outer conquest of space to the inner conquest of spirit. Holy wars will occur – an extreme example of hardware shifting to software and spiritual values.”” Living at the Speed of Light MacLean’s magazine, 1980 b) Marshall McLuhan dies in Toronto on December 31, 1980. c) “ It’s misleading to suppose there’s any basic difference between education & entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter. “ Hot & Cool

Borg

vs. McEnroe

a) Seve Tignor : “Borg was the biggest. Jimmy Connors was with him but Borg was a bigger international star, he was the first real professional. Borg and Connors were the first guys who didn’t play in the amateurs, they always played as pros, they always played the sport.” b) “With McEnroe and Reagan, the US Open became, at least to us, the most important tournament. It was this Americanization of tennis. McEnroe, this American guy, this kid from Long Island taking the top tournaments from Borg, who was this all time legend.” c) Wimbledon, england. America vs. europe, Big Mac vs. ice Borg. The fourth set tiebreak of the Wimbledon final between the defending champion Björn Borg and John Mcenroe will remain unforgettable. It ranges over 22 minutes and produces 34 contested points, a record for a Wimbledon final. After losing the opening set 6-1 to an all-out Mcenroe assault, Borg takes the next two, 7-5, 6-3. in the fourthset tiebreak, Mcenroe saves five match points and Borg six set points before Mcenroe wins the set. Borg serves first to begin the fifth set and falls behind 15-40. Borg then wins 19 straight points on serve in the deciding set and prevails after 3 hours, 53 minutes. Borg is champion for the fifth time by 1-6, 7-5, 6-3, 6-7, 8-6. in 1981, Mcenroe will end Borg’s reign, defeating him at the US open. Thomas Hertog I a) “A lot happened in physics in 1980 and 1981. People couldn’t explain why our universe was so large and why it looked the same in all directions. In 1981, Alan Guth came up with the theory of inflation, which states that a very small quantum universe can expand into a big universe. He observed that it is the same in all directions. That was a landmark discovery.” b) Thomas Hertog’s office in Paris is small. Ridiculously small. There is a chalkboard on the wall and a picture of his twins. c) String theory and inflation were developed around 1980 and 1981, and in 2000 you brought these two theories together, including the observer. “By bringing together string theory and inflation you introduce quantum physics in inflation–the observer is an ancillary to that. You can do quantum physics in CERN as well and the observer is around. But what the top-down approach is all about is the statement that the observer is relevant. It’s a tree. It’s ry, the observer, and string theoinflation. It’s that triangle.”

Thomas Hertog II That is why inflation is a physical concept. But the big problem with the term is that you are driven

towards a notion of an eternally inflating universe, which means an infinitely large universe in which every possible thing happens. Everything you can imagine happens somewhere in this universe. Because it is imaginable ? Because it’s infinitely large. Even something with an extremely small probability will happen somewhere, because you have infinitely many places. Inflation solved problems in 1981, and in 1983 a guys says, Well, if inflation is there, then the universe becomes infinite and then what ? Since 1983, eternal inflation has been a consequence of this beyond mathematical exploration. But it has also been a real crisis in theoretical physics. If it’s infinitely large and everything happens, how are you going to predict what we’re going to see ? We only see local things, we are not traveling all over the universe, and we are bound to one location. The problem is that you have no source of relative probabilities in eternally inflating universes. That was the motivation for the top-down approach. It is really a quantum approach to cosmology and in that topdown approach we also have eternally inflating universes. They arise from a quantum framework, which means they arise from certain probabilities and you can calculate what you would see. We wrote a paper a few months ago, Eternal Inflation without Metaphysics. Eternal inflation is this infinitely large universe where everything happens somewhere. But to explain what we would observe we don’t need to know what happens in the far future, far away. These are all things that can’t influence us. To explain the history of what we see, we just need to know the past and the present. And a quantum framework allows you to calculate local probabilities like for things that we would observe, sending over all the rest, which doesn’t interfere with us, with local observables. That’s a nometaphysics spot. A no-metaphysics spot refers to the part of the mathematical picture, which exists informally within the theory but is irrelevant for our observations. That’s what I was alluding to earlier, you have the mathematical exploration but you have to come back to the observations, you need to go both ways. That’s the tension now. Why turn your back on the future ? You can’t look both ways ? You just don’t care. In our future, the probabilities will depend on what will have happened in the past. But whether a certain star explodes in our future or not is irrelevant. In quantum theory, there will be a universe in which our sun explodes tomorrow and there will be another universe in which it doesn’t. This is a bifurcation. There is a small probability that our sun explodes, and there is quite a probability that it doesn’t explode. You don’t turn your back on the future ; you just don’t care what happens in the future. It’s the proposition. Yeah, it’s just a mathematical consistency of probabilities. Thomas Hertog III It is close to consensus that there’s not one universe. Among philosophers it is called model dependent realism. It’s a realist approach because once I specify my question, I get a real universe and I get a real prediction, which I can test. What you call reality is not something absolute or objective, but it is real in the context of a specific model, of a specific landscape. Does that imply relativism ? Relativism would question the notion of any reality corresponding to our theory and that’s a step further, which I don’t think is needed. That’s almost like positivism. Is it important for you that it’s connected to this realism ? Yeah, I’m more of the realism type. The Royal Weddings HRH The Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II and heir apparent, was married to The Lady Diana Frances Spencer on July 29, 1981. HRH Prince William of Wales, second grandson of Queen Elizabeth II, eldest son of HRH The Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, and second in line to the throne, was married to Miss Catherine Elizabeth Middleton on April 29, 2011. The Clock On the morning of August 2nd, 1980, at 10.25, a bomb exploded in the main station of Bologna, Italy. Eighty-ﬁve people died and over 200 were wounded. A large clock on the outside wall of the main building broke during the explosion. Soon after, it was repaired and continued working for the next 16 years. The picture of the clock with its hands ﬁxed at 10.25 became the symbol of the event, and as such is reproduced on posters and banners during each

annual commemoration. In 1996 the clock stopped working, and it was decided to set it permanently at 10.25, as a remembrance symbol. It has been noted anecdotally that people remember the clock as having been always set at the time of the explosion showing a possible effect of a strong social symbolic representation on the accuracy of

WE. We need a new form of WE. If you ask me where I see the models, now you will laugh, but I see some nice tendencies. Maybe I’m too romantic here, you know which TV series I like ? This will be very naïve, but did you see Heroes ? You know, some individuals have some supernatural ability, which makes them freaks. One can move in time,

Cycles II

a) In October 1981, Muhammad Anwar as-Sadat is assassinated in during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Egypt’s crossing of the

DAF : Alles ist Gut

personal memories. Stefania de Vito, Roberto Cubelli, and Sergio Della Sala. Death and Rebirth a) In the script of The Yakuza are some of the best lines ever written in Hollywood and among them is a saying which will stand for Paul Schrader’s entire oeuvre : “When an American cracks up, he opens up the window and shoots up a bunch of strangers. When a Japanese cracks up, he closes the window and kills himself. “ All of Paul Schrader’s films seem to be about this ying and yang, about homicide and suicide. And when the window is already open, in moments of grace something happens. While in Mishima the window is closed, Schrader adds that suicide has “a lot to do with the artistic impulse to transform the world.” b) We staged a procession across the Ganges. We chanted, we burnt masks, we dispersed the ashes. All in an attempt to free ourselves from History. Rishikesh was the ideal, if not only place for this transformation. c) We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency. Jean Baudrillard, On Nihilism, 1980

the other can throw out fire. They are all excommunicated and this is their kind of strange community. A confederation of freaks. I recently wrote a text on Kafka as a theorist of Communist culture. Kafka wrote Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk when he knew he was dying. You know what is so wonderful ? He knew in the end, “this is the last thing I’m writing.” And it has nothing of the standard Kafka boldness ; you know, authority, angst, whatever. It is just a story of poor mice who have a singer to amuse them and when she wants some privileges they say “no.” A very beautiful story. It is a kind of poor Communist society held together by a popular artist.” Slavoj Žižek c) The Invisible Committee : THE COMING INSURRECTION : ALL POWER TO THE COMMUNES “Less possessions, more connections !” Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment and ﬂagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy. Thirty years punctuated, it is true, by delusionary interludes : the interlude of 1981-83, when we were deluded into thinking a government of the left might make people better oﬀ ; the “easy money” interlude of 1986-89, when we were all supposed to be playing the market and getting rich ; the internet interlude of 1998-2001, when

Suez Canal by the Organization to Free Egypt, a branch of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The assassination squad was led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli after a fatwā approving the assassination had been obtained from Omar Abdel-Rahman. b) In 1981, Osama bin Laden gets his diploma from the King Abdel-Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri attend lectures by Muhammad Qutb, a supporter and promoter of his older brother Sayyid Qutb’s ideas. Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood shaped the ideas of Islamists and particularly of Al Qaeda – being executed as “a martyr for Islam” by the Egyptian government in 1966. c) Arab Spring : As of February 2012, governments have been overthrown in four countries, two of the leaders where important players around 1980, 1981 : In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak resigned on 11 February 2011, ending his 30-year presidency and a 30-year Emergency Law. Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown on 23 August 2011, and was killed on 20 October 2011, in his hometown of Sirte.

There is only one narrative : Neo-Yogaism. Neo-Yogaismus remains.

WE !

a) “I am interested in this idea of an emancipatory collective, a community of believers that tries to suspend all these hierarchical, symbolic and authoritarian relations. This is something that happened for the first time in Christianity, the combination of love and hate.” Slavoj Žižek b) “We need a big WE. I fully accept that. We need a big WE. We need a big WE, which is not simply this kind of a liberal union of individuals but also not an old kind of archaic, organic, totalitarian

Diez / Roth

everyone was going to get a virtual career through being well-connected, when a diverse but united France, cultured and multicultural, would bring home every World Cup. But here we are, we’ve drained our supply of delusions, we’ve hit rock bottom and are totally broke, or buried in debt. 1980 : In the Shadow of the Sun, Derek Jarman A security guard is found murdered in the bathroom of the Swedish Embassy in Guatemala City.

2081

Indira

a) In January 1980, Mrs. Gandhi’s heroine-goddess image of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, wins her the election in a landslide and she returns to power. Her son Sanjay wins his constituency and is elected to a parliamentary seat for the first time. The problems of this term are owing to the separatist Sikh militants in Punjab, who fight for an independent state of Khalistan. b) In June 1980, Sanjay Gandhi dies in a plane crash near Delhi’s Safdarjung Airport after losing control of his plane. When Indira Gandhi is told about her son’s death, she immediately asks for

any keys that he had on him.

DAF

Guatemala / Wanne Mute Records/ Conny’s Studio 1. Sato-Sato 2. Der Mussolini 3. Rote Lippen (Red Lips) 4. Mein Herz Macht Bum (My Heart Goes Boom) 5. Der Räuber und Der Prinz (The Robber and The Prince) 6. Ich Und Die Wirklichkeit (Me and Reality) 7. Als Wär’s Das Letze Mal (Like It Was The Last Time) 8. Verlier Nicht Den Kopf (Don’t Lose Your Head) 9. Alle Gegen Alle (Everyone Against Everyone) 10. Alles Ist Gut Will Self : But how far did they go ? They didn’t really go anywhere. Basically all of the Deboridan dérives were from the Parc des Buttes Chaumaont where he grew up, to the Île de la Cité. That’s just like a morning stroll for me, that’s like five or six kilometers. It’s a sporty thing as well ? It’s not sporty, but the interesting thing about long distance walking is when you feel the whole shape of the landscape. London is built in an enormous river valley. To walk out of the city you have to leave this house at six in the morning, at dawn almost, and you will not see green fields until the evening, until you’re losing the light in the evening. It takes between twelve and fifteen hours walking. The body moving through space. And the connection of the body to the landscape. That’s very Heidegger. Yes, it’s very Heidegger, yes. Much more, much more. Do you want to apologize for that ? No, not at all, why would I ? Because you look like you regret it. No, I’m fine. Your walks are much more Heidegger than French ? Of course. The French are lightweights. I like to walk 40 or 50 kilometers a day, that’s when it gets interesting. JLG a) montage : only seeing what can be seen (not said, not written) / the atomic explosion on top of the hill of those who only live once / reconnect / the sky and the bush of those who follow the rule of the game, before the world war explodes / (the photos as x-ray of the malady) Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma Jean-Luc Godard, Edition Albatros, 1980 b) ‘Sauve qui peut (la vie) is organized like a musical score, composed of four movements. The imaginary : After breaking up with Paul, Denise goes to the countryside / The fear : Paul is afraid of loneliness / The business : Isabelle teaches her sister the trade of the prostitute / The music : After an accident, Paul is dying and Denise doesn’t see him’ c) Sauve qui peut. Colin McCabe : Opening scene : Jacques Dutronc is hammering on the wall in the hotel and Godard says, You sit there. He puts me right in the middle of what is happening but given where the camera is I’m completely invisible. It was like the most brilliant lesson in film. Was it your first film set ? Colin McCabe : Yeah, then we break and Godard talks to the crew because it’s still in an attempt to make a collective 1968 kind of thing. He talks for an hour and a half about the labor process of cinema. It was the most brilliant lecture about the speeds of money ; that money is always either too slow or too fast in film. First it’s too slow because you can’t get it, and then you’ve got it and you have to spend it too quickly. It was equally clear that the guys who were listening to this hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about. We are all going to collaborate but Jean-Luc is just going to talk, and talk, and talk. (laughs)

Chess Not far from Zurich lives chess legend Viktor Kortschnoi. In the list of champions he is Number 7, and his world championship fights toly Karpov in 1978 against Anaand 1981 are unforgettable, not only as meetings of two superbrains but also as the Cold War clash between East and West. The result was a parapsychological

war with drugs, yoga and yogurt : I always felt that Karpov could feel me–what I wanted, what I planned, how I played. He had a sense for it or a feeling. The Dutchman Jan Timman1 practiced with me before his match with Karpov. He showed me a position. I was supposed to analyze 20 moves. Okay, I said, This is how Karpov will react. But then in a match against Timman, Karpov went exactly the other way and won the game. You mean Karpov has psychic abilities ? Yes, sure. This is what I’m talking about for more than five minutes !

his and Vivienne Westwood’s New Romantic fashion line. But Adam has learned the ten lessons of The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle by heart – how to become the world’s number one tourist attraction – and turns into the fi rst teenage idol of the 1980s, the fi rst real pop star. McLaren meanwhile is betting all on virgin sex with Bow Wow Wow and

last days, can take a week. You don’t just do it to come into contact with an object that is latent with memories, but it’s like having them evoked in you, and so one is played upon by reality. That’s why young men and women in the 18th and 19th century Europe would go for the year of wandering.”

Wögerbauer from 1986 : You started out writing poetry. Oh please ! What does that mean to you today ? Nothing whatsoever, I don’t think about it at all. You don’t think back over every step you’ve ever taken, do you ? You’d have to set billions, hundreds of bil-

with performance evenings in different theatre houses, to compile a dramaturgic progress from a congrès en miniature into a play or an opera with a beginning, middle and end. Like almost everyone we talked to, Mr. Pollesch liked the idea. And out came the Psycho Fashion Shows. It was a random John Cage-like approach to deliver information we collected on a catwalk. The actors were counting the steps they made and entered the numbers into pads which controled video and sound clips. And behind every number was a film projection, a sound or the direction to perform an action. Like dance steps in a space of numbers and data. Alternatively the actors were reading from a huge book, which contained film scripts and excerpts from books from the years 1980 and 1981. The principle was not easy to understand, not even the actors got it in the beginning. The show at the Neumarkt theatre in Zurich was such a success, that the city’s mayor wanted to cut future funding. Later we called the stuff Veryactions (another Pollesch-Cage influence and we started telling stories. People loved it even more.) b) Book 4 was originally called Psycho. Then Psycho 4. We asked Liz Greene if she could help us with a horoscope for the years 1980 and 1981. The fabulous psycho-astrologer from London seemed to be the perfect choice since she combines astrology with Jungian analysis. She suggested we meet Alexander von Schlieffen, an artist-astrologer living in Berlin just around the corner, to talk to him about the universe. We did. And the book 4 was called :

Problems of our Times (1981) : Keeping up with the Joneses. (The Seattle effect)

Barbara Kirchner,

Problems of our Times (2081) : Most people who have survived are stupid but feel fine. Breathe in, breathe out. (The Delhi effect)

Problems of our Times (2011) : Many people muddle up correlation and causation but still call themselves scientists. (The Vienna effect) Affective Psycho II Computing, 2081 “Here’s what I want to get at with all this : If these machine-based or machine-administered or machine-operated emotions – those are three stages that can cause different degrees of anxiety, which is in and of itself an emotion – if this way of feeling becomes the norm, it changes once again the left one of the two frontiers that determine the advancement of human interaction with energy and information ; the boundaries of social set-ups in which people live, the limits of what is socially possible and conceivable. Anger or hatred are emotions, and as such they don’t live in a vacuum, but in violent relationships, for example. And often there is a lot of misunderstanding about these relationships, as if violence were a thing that certain people, for instance, had IN them and it could be pulled out of them in order to jump at certain other people. Whereas in reality, it isn’t a thing, but a relation. If something – a relation, for example - can be produced mechanically, it always yields to both enlightenment and the dulling of people’s minds : It is possible to make that thing visible in a more precise and explicit way, but also camouflage it more effectively. An electronic interconnectedness can help create more democratic structures than before, at the same time it can deliver orders to followers more quickly. Just like one of the media historian’s favorite thoughts used to be : When photography came along, painting had to be quick on its feet – on the one hand, it had been devalued as a technique for certain modes of reproduction, on the other hand, it could unburden itself of those duties and look for new ones, to some extent more interesting ones.”

Blitz

a) The style of the first years of the decade was very post-punk – ‘Baroque proportions’ as Rosetta Brooks calls it in her ZG text from1980 about Steve Strange’s Blitz Club in Covent Garden. Rusty Egan is djing : Roxy Music, YMO, Kraftwerk and David Bowie. In November 1980, Strange puts out his fi rst album with Visage and has his first hit, Fade To Grey, which would go to number one in 21 countries. George O’Dowd works as a coat checker at the Blitz, but will be fired for allegedly stealing from handbags. He will call himself

Boy George

Other Blitz Kids are : Marilyn ; Princess Julia ; Martin Degville, later of Sigue Sigue Sputnik ; the bass player Tony James, also of Sigue Sigue Sputnik and Generation X and The Sisters of Mercy ; Isabella Blow ;

John Galliano

;

the dancer Michael Clark ; and the hatter Stephen Jones. For the first time gays directly and openly infl uence youth culture. Boy George, Steve Strange, Soft Cell and Marilyn. Subculture, Style and Fashion become a unity with growing importance. I-D and The Face are the new trendsetters. Malcolm McLaren might be in the Blitz. Adam paid McLaren £1000 to create a concept for him and in the process McLaren stole Adam’s band, The Ants, persuading them to join Bow Wow Wow with Anabella (along with Boy George for a few days, but McLaren found him too gay), which left Adam looking for a new band. McLaren needs to promote

his new product Annabella. But her mother is informing Scotland Yard and the band is only allowed to leave England after McLaren promises to no longer promote Annabella as the ‘Sex Kitten’. At the same time Calvin Klein ads appear in the US with 15-yearold Brooke Shields saying that nothing comes between her and her Calvins. c) “In reaction to Punk, which had pushed alienation in your face, New Pop liked to pretend that the world outside didn’t exist. It persists as a constant shadow…” Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage in The Faber Book of Pop. d) All images by Derek Ridgers. It is believed the academic wars of 2071-3 led to the decimation of those involved. 2074-5 +MICHAEL JACKSON+ returned to his people in the shape of pin, and declared himself to them as the $GOOGLE$ gOD, a concept whose meaning had by then been lost.

b) “Once one accepts that the narratives that one lives by are the narratives of the other, then we get into just how complicated this really is. I say, Well, who am I ? And who am I to the others ? Frantz Fanon used the wonderful phrase in The Wretched of the Earth, “I am over determined, from without.” Being from Martinique, being mixed race, and being oppressed, his concept of self was, I am over determined from outside. So the narratives of Christopher Bollas, I don’t believe in them, I’ve lost belief in the narrative.”

Lady Di

The Things That Dreams Are Made Of

Delhi

Take a cruise to China Or a train to Spain Go round the world Again and again. Meet a girl on a boat Meet a boy on a train And fall in love Without the pain. Everybody needs love and adventure Everybody needs cash to spend Everybody needs love and affection Everybody needs two or three friends. These are the things These are the things The things that dreams are made of These are the things These are the things The things that dreams are made of The Human League, 1981 Christopher Bollas a) “As we move about wherever we’re going, the objects that we encounter will evoke clusters of associations in our unconscious. Any journey does involve very profound unconscious processes. I learned about this by reading Wordsworth poetry. We read The Prelude and, in effect, we are studying Wordsworth’s relation to landscape and his theory of memory, which is embedded in landscape. That’s what his poetry is all about. But I also learned from the Australian Aborigines and their concept of dreaming. As they walk around their environment, objects literally hold memory in them, so if you want to recollect something in Aboriginal Australian, you go for a walkabout, and that can

lions of thoughts in motion. Like with walking and running. You can’t be constantly retracing where you’ve been in your mind, or you’ll never get anywhere interesting. The appearance of your volume of poetry entitled “Ave Virgil” in 1981, was that also the work of the publisher ? Did he “misplace” that too ? Well, I found it and I thought to myself, this is actually a good poem, from that period, and that was it. He publishes everything I give him. b) Rainald Goetz on Thomas Berhard, die Kälte 27.04.1981 “Thomas Bernhard lesen und in seine abgründige Ekel-Welt gerissen sein : das ist eins, nahezu unausweichlich. Auch der vierte Teil seiner Jugenderinnerungen entwickelt diesen längst bekannten Sog. Von den ersten Sätzen an wird das Arsenal der Schreckensworte in der üblichen Bernhardschen Virtuosität zu den üblichen Bedrückungsbildern arrangiert. Hat der Leser nicht nach wenigen Seiten, gelangweilt vom immer-gleichen Elend, das Buch weggelegt, hat er weitergelesen, ist er schon verloren. Das Unbedingte und Monomane dieser Prosa verschlingt ihn. Seit Bernhard schreibt, ist das so.”

Michele Serres (Volume 9, So Far from Home ) : Often two stories put in relation to one another shed an intelligent light. The statue of Baal beside the Challenger helps to understand a lot. Or take the death of Lady Di : Roman emperors who died accidental deaths were deified. Are we so far away from the Roman Empire ? Lady Di made into a goddess, that is like the apotheosis of the roman paganism. In Antiquity they were laughing about the phenomenon of apotheosis, today we cherish it.

is a nation state now, and is officially referred to as The Family. It has managed to invade parts of central India. It now has the largest stock of nuts and raisins. There are no private dinners now. The idea of community eating and a more formal dining etiquette is the norm now. Dining customs have a formal seating arrangement and are a ritual, the learning of which begins very early in life. Every night, the first citizen of State along with judges, orators and doctors sit in places of honour and the common people, who are referred to as the ‘relatives’, occupy the rest of the city hall. The first citizen, followed by all the officers, make speeches in the honour of the ‘relatives’, and remember all the men who once roamed this city. Utensils are honoured and some rock salt is ground. Only then does dinner start. An abundant quantity of meats, rice, rotis and sweets are served at these lavish sweets. A barley drink and paan end the meal and is also offered to welcome a guest or to bid farewell. After the dinner, the new guests kick away the temporary fireplace. Recently, our first citizen has begun observing vegetarian days and has forbidden animal slaughter on Thursdays and Sundays. She has said that had the burden of the world not been on her shoulders, she would have totally abstained from meat. The History of Contemporary Food or How We Killed Our Emotional Appetite, Year 2081, by Amitesh Grover

2081 Psycho

Cold a) Interview with Thomas Berhard by Werner

a) We asked René Pollesch if he would help us

a) In just ten days Paul Schrader writes Taxi Driver. All chronicles of the time, like Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, would describe him as the nerdiest in a sea of nerds : “Short, with greasy black hair, a broad, fleshy nose, and geeky, Groucho Marx glasses, he carried all his childhood frailties with him into young adulthood. He suffered from nervous tics, ulcers, and asthma. A speech impediment made him mumble self-consciously, eyes cast down, staring at his feet. He was even claustrophobic.” But they would also describe him as the most brazen hustler. b) In March 1981 John Hinckley, Jr. shoots Ronald Reagan, missing his heart by less than an inch, the bullet piercing his lung. Hinckley wants to impress Jodie Foster or the character she plays in Taxi Driver, a twelve-year-old prostitute. Reagan recovers fast, and when his wife Nancy visits him in hospital he quotes Jack Dempsey : “Honey, I forgot to duck.” The previous December, Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon with fi ve bullets from a .38 caliber revolver, convinced after reading J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye that he needed to kill someone famous in order to ensure his own fame. c) December 8, 1980 – In New York, Mark David Chapman shouts in front of the Dakota Building : ‘Mr. Lennon’ and fires five times from a .38-caliber revolver to kill John Lennon. Chapman claims that J.D.Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye instructed him to carry out the assasination. Hours before, Lennon gave him an autograph on his new LP Double Fantasy, which will be sold in 2003 for $525,000.

Psycho III

e) Q : Does psychology ask for explanations ? Don DeLillo : I would agree that in my novels explanations do more harm than good. Q : Is it now hard for you to answer our questions ? To go further than in the novel ? Don DeLillo : It’s hard in a way and in another way I’m finding out things that haven’t come to the surface. It’s not as hard as it’s–forgive me–unnecessary. (Another joyful laugh) But I often learn more about the book when it’s finished. Sometimes I don’t know what the theme is. b) Q : Is this an ideal or is it frightening to be totally lost ? Don DeLillo : I don’t know that it’s either. If it were to persist, it would finally either make you a saint or a mystic or it would make you a mental case. It would have to persist for a long time. (110310_Mao3.indd 8 :08 PM Volume III 80*81)

William Burroughs The Cities of Red Night

a) The Cities of Red Night were six in number : Thamaghis, Ba’dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana and Ghadis. These cities were located in an area roughly corresponding to the Gobi Desert, a hundred thousand years ago. At that time the desert was dotted with large oases and traversed by a river which emptied into the Caspian Sea…. In the thinly populated desert area north of Tamaghis a portentous event occurred. Some say it was

STUDIOLO / Edition Patrick Frey Trix + Robert Haussmann

Nº 127 ISBN 978-3-905929-27-0 EUR 32 | CHF 40

Edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen With texts by Robert Haussmann, Fredi Fischli, Liam Gillick, Karl Holmqvist, Niels Olsen and a discussion between Gabrielle Schaad and Trix + Robert Haussmann in German and English Design : Teo Schifferli Softcover, 224 pages, 187 b/w and color images 16.8 × 23 cm | 6 ½ × 9"

IBM Showroom, Zurich, 1987 page 77: Chair-Fun, Neon-Chair, 1967