MONO/e Text

INDEX Chri Frautschi

Where is this house, the Haus am Gern? ❉ Trmasan Bruialesi

Painting The Numbers … ❉ Claudia Spinelli, Rolf Bismarck

Good art is Not a security blanket ❉ Andrea Domesle

‘The same procedure as every year ’ ❉ Thomas Schönberger

Transgression as Continuity in the work of Haus am Gern ❉ Annelise Zwez

Haus am Gern is a real Fiction authors

gern: German adverb meaning “with pleasure”, “gladly”; “Haus am Gern” is an unusual German word combination implying a house located on a hillside or river called “Gern”.

Chri Frautschi

Where is this house, the Haus am Gern?

People often ask me “so, where is this house, the Haus am Gern?”.

The directions sound complicated, but it’s quite easy as long as you follow them 1:1: First you go left, along the line of provocation. Take 475 steps, turn past the Baubüro and continue in a steady rise until you reach the Paechbrottree. Ask a blessing for art until you hear the hare bell to the beat of the drum … a funny effect … then pass the opening – but not in my backyard! Stay on the main street, because the Young Responsible Artists hang out by the museum on strike. Artistfuckers and naked people finders everywhere, shouting “show us, buy us, sell us!”. They have a carte blanche designed for change and may splash you with a warped offer. Are you still around? Check your Rolex before you pass Lifetime Europe and think of the bill. After a couple of near misses, make a final cut across the field with the tractor in it and you’ve arrived at the history free space. Ask the Art Process Inspector for the key, and you’ll be ab­le

to see it from there, below the church spire with the horse hanging from it.

Your legs may be restless, but finding the Haus am Gern is as simple as not judging a horse by its colour.

Je ne sais quoi Maybe just: TGFHAGOTWWBABP!!

(Thank God For Haus Am Gern Or The World Would Be A Boring Place!)

Trmasan Bruialesi

Painting The Numbers …

“What does Haus am Gern do?” I am occasionally asked. “Haus am Gern does nothing for me”, I usually answer. Ha, ha! – of course that’s a joke, and a bad one at that. But the reaction of the questioner always amuses me a lot, which – I assume – is in Haus am Gern’s interest too. For Haus am Gern also likes to answer questions that were not intended that way or that were never asked at all. At least that is the impression I get from the overview of works provided by this monograph: there is a naughty child at work here, one that “spits on the stairs” 1. However, I interpret this as a maneuver to divert our attention from things as they seem to things as they are, to persuade the recipient (for in every project Haus am Gern focuses on specific recipients, who rarely belong just to the art world) to leave behind the wishes, projections and expectations that society likes to protect itself with in its contact with artists. This is the case even when the role of the artist is merely to paint the “numbers of their fellow in­ma­ tes at the camp” 1.

“Our artistic strategy“, write Haus am Gern, “is to use images to create mo­ments of tension and act as surfaces for projections, thus posing es­ sen­tial questions about the capacity to cope with reality, beyond the con­ ventional boarders of the institutional context”. The awkward as well as presumptuous formulations with which Haus am Gern express their ar­ tis­tic strategy support my assumption above. “In our shared artistic work we perceive or create gaps in existing systems, which we fill by any means that impose themselves”, is one such principle. Or another: “We act as the label Haus am Gern and declare ourselves to be a state of the art enter­ prise”. It is obvious that an art historian would shudder reading these sen­ tences. But that strikes at the heart of the issue: the reaction is fully in­ ten­ded, for “with Haus am Gern we developed an artistic strategy that allows us to adopt any role provided by the system called ‘art’ ”, so for

example writing the art historical texts in this magazine themselves (sic!), and “using this surprisingly obvious stylistic device we intervene in art discourse and elsewhere …”. Elsewhere? What else is there? “We have always been interested in the issue of Power. Nor are we afraid of being co-opted. In fact, we seek to challenge both ourselves and our audience.

Our actions and interventions take their own course, becoming pleasurable adventures to those involved. But pleasure is not all: being overtaxed, ta­ ken by surprise, is part of any effective artistic intervention”. This, Haus am Gern continue, usually takes place using straightforward, widely under­ stood images, and refuses the “protective means of artistic ab­strac­tion” in order to effectively extend thoughts and associations both towards the inside and the outside. There is nothing to add to this, except the request to the readers that I first expressed several years ago: “Ladies and Gentle­ men, now please draw a horse!” 2 Trmasan Bruialesi 1

“Kabakov: If you assume that the entire history of art is the history of institutions and not that of free artists who

work within the scope of an institution with an unbroken tradition […], then it’s important to realize that we work today in an eternal institution, whose directors change and whose buildings are renovated, but which basically always fulfills the same functions – participation in the life of the whole ‘camp’ (the artist participates in the life of the camp by painting the numbers) – but on the other hand it has an internal management of its own that very strictly supervises the relationship between all the members of the bureaucratic organization. It checks above all that they don’t make mess or spit on the stairs, and that they turn up for work – in other words that they perform this or that function.

There’s a system of control, a system of artists or virtuosos, who know the demands well and meet them meticulously, and then a stratum of young, new members who aren’t yet in the picture. The novices are required to find their feet.

If they do, they gradually get their bearings and learn the way to the second floor. If they do poorely, after a while they recieve a mute recommendation to leave, to vacate place. Entry into this institution and life within are completely regimented. The greatest feeling of freedom within the institution is achieved by those who know the behavioral code exactly and stick to it.”

PAVEL PEPPERSTEIN UND GÄSTE – Projekt Sammlung 1998 – 2002, Ed. Kunsthaus Zug, Matthias Haldemann, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern 2004, p.96–97 2

NJAHBIC, Preface by Trmasan Bruialesi in the publication for the exhibition of the same title at Kunsthalle Bern

2001, Edition Haus am Gern, Biel/Bienne

Claudia Spinelli, Rolf Bismarck

Good art is not a security blanket.

A conversation with Barbara Meyer Cesta and Rudolf Steiner

CS: Compared to renowned, long-estab­li­ shed institutions such as Kunsthalle Basel or Kunst­halle Bern, Haus am Gern is very young at twelve years. Did the institution ne­ ­­ver­the­less have to re-define itself during this time?

BMC: We never intended a final definition.

But in order to keep a hold on the direction in which our work was heading, we needed some clarification. I am not sure whether we have outgrown our baby years yet, although looking back there was certainly some de­ ve­­lop­ment. But I do believe that there are com­mon threads linking our work.

RS: Perhaps we’ve lost some of our naivety.

The attraction of a free yet empty playfulness has faded. But I don’t think we need to worry about that.

CS: Your starting point was the idea of a fi­c­ ti­­ve institution.

RS: The construct of an institution of our own was intended to give us – as young, un­known artists – more weight, as well as le­ve­ling the power imbalance between un­ known artists and institutions such as mu­ seums and exhibition spaces.

CS: The name Haus am Gern suggests a spe­­cific place. It can be rather confusing that the work you do under this label is con­text-

ba­sed and that all your projects refer to spe­ cific, but continuously changing, places.

BMC: From the very beginning we were in­ te­­res­ted in playing with the perceptions of peo­ple, of target groups, perhaps fooling them a little by assuming such a label with­ out being able to define what’s behind it, con­ ­scious­ly kee­ping our options open. From the start, Haus am Gern was an act of com­mu­­ nicative provocation and it has remained so.

CS: Haus am Gern, Bern, lake shore, alpine views, cute and cuddly?

RS: Of course, Haus am Gern plays with con­ ­ entions and images like the house by the v lake and similar associations. But the name has nothing to do with referencing local cli­ chés. We simply encountered the four letters G, E R and N in this chance ar­ran­gement.

BMC: The name is actually an “objet trouvé.”

The four letters were probably once part of an advertising slogan. We found them and eventually washed them. Suddenly they stood there in this order and we felt com­ pelled. Unfortunately GERN only works in German. But in that language the word is both unremarkable and appealing; it works very well with the principle of our work: “straight to the heart.” It’s almost impossible to avoid the impact of the word, even when it appears in the context of an institution.

CS: And yet the term isn’t easy to grasp.

RS: We like that it makes people pause and ask questions. In relation to the name spe­ci­ fically, we’ve experienced both. Some­ti­mes people are thrilled and approach Haus am Gern like a comfortable sofa. At other times they try to withdraw from its pull and turn away quickly.

CS: A welcome side effect then – do you aim to provoke?

BMC: No, first of all we just want to appeal to people and actually reach them. It’s just not possible to thrust something in front of people that they have no connection to. If our name alone ensures that it’s difficult to simply walk by and ignore us, even if there is confusion and uncertainty mixed in with these reactions, that’s a good thing. In my opinion good art always causes uncertainty in the first instance. Good art is not a se­cu­ rity blanket. That is one of the foundations of our artistic practice as a whole.

RS: In fact, what Haus am Gern does re­ mains open. It cannot be pinned down, nei­ ther in terms of material or medium, nor the­matically. Haus am Gern avoids easy categorisation.

BMC: We don’t supply ready-to-use pro­ducts.

Every work, every piece is a new sto­ry of its own. And yet: in the first instance Haus am Gern works like a label.

RS: A label whose work is context specific and which by now is expected to provoke.

That’s tricky on its own terms. If, for example, we are consistent and make the art world our topic when working at Kunsthalle Bern, people are disappointed and find our work less edgy.

BMC: Which is a cheap accusation I can’t ac­ cept. Context remains context. If I’m in a

butcher’s shop I work with that environment and when I’m in an art museum that’s the system I engage with. If we receive a com­ mis­­sion in Köniz, we will create a work for Köniz. Our approach doesn’t change; it’s just a different environment every time.

CS: How can we situate Haus am Gern po­li­ tically?

BMC: Haus am Gern always acts with re­fe­ rence to context, which differentiates it from my own personal work that sometimes deals with more abstract, general ideas. In ad­di­ tion, Haus am Gern often seeks out col­la­ boration with other artists or experts from different fields and thus extends the concept of authorship.

RS: The contextual reference can be very contemporary because in the end we focus on places and systems, which may them­ selves be influenced by distant events or the larger picture. A good example for this is the project we realised in Steffisburg.

BMC: Exactly! When we received the invi­ta­ tion to a group exhibition in Steffisburg, war broke out again in Lebanon. They expected a conventional work from us, something nice to hang on a wall or place on a plinth, perhaps. The result was a reaction against both these things: the war and this rather well-off farming village. On top of that, it was completely conventional in terms of medium, except that we couldn’t realise our original idea of working with the rural wo­ men’s embroidery skills, for the tra­di­tio­nal craft of embroidery no longer exists there.

So we ourselves embroidered the text, which referred to events in Lebanon and the power of art.

CS: So the social and the political repeatedly become a focus of your work.

BMC: Of course we react to things around

us, but in any case our own context is the pla­net as a whole, not some hermetically sea­led white cube. We couldn’t produce any­ thing that way.

CS: To what extent do you practice a critique of society and power structures?

BMC: Well, we live in a society that doesn’t allow anyone to be in trouble or feel bad – if so then only because they couldn’t finish the Sudoku that morning. That’s the frame of reference that we accept and in which we move consciously. And yet we attempt to broaden perspectives and use our com­ men­tary to point beyond the illusion of a perfect little world. In that sense our work isn’t site specific at all, but an analysis of the general conditions in relation to life in these places.

RS: The work in Steffisburg was later inclu­ ded in the annual “Christmas Exhibition“ for local artists at Kunstmuseum Solothurn and eventually acquired by that museum.

BMC: For me, it’s a pleasure to know that a work by Haus am Gern in the shape of two embroidered oven gloves is part of a col­lec­ tion. Oven gloves that comment on an in­sti­tu­ ­tion, a collection and that are also pro­du­ced by an institution, Haus am Gern, who want to take power and create the existing system anew all in one go. It’s a mental vic­to­ry.

CS: On the topic of sales – many of your work-and-project descriptions mention that you have sold a work and who to. What is so important about selling to you?

RS: It’s about inscribing ourselves in the sys­ tem.

BMC: And it’s about the very act of exchange using money – the price bestows value on the act itself. It’s not about us getting money and being proud of it because in most cases

the profit is irrelevant. But a work becomes part of a collection and therefore an integral a comment on it.

CS: Does it make a difference to you whe­ ther the buyer is a private collector or a pub­ lic institution?

RS: With a public collection at least there re­mains some guarantee of visibility.

BMC: I personally always have a huge issue with our work disappearing from public view above someone’s sofa. In a private space our work is neutralised and loses significance. The oven gloves have a dif­fe­ rent, witty quality in a museum or public collection. The very thought that a restorer might suddenly need to contact a textile mu­seum in order to preserve our work has a funny side to it.

CS: That is something I have noticed several times with your work: your projects are intended to have an effect, not just to com­ ment on something but to kick off a new story of their own.

RS: Yes, that’s true. And when it doesn’t hap­pen, we’re disappointed. Were we not precise enough? Was the quality lacking? Or was it a problem of communication? But then when people read about our exhibition in the general section of the local newspaper, not the culture pages; when they talk about it in the pub and come to see the exhibition, that is the best thing that can happen.

Popularity really is important to us. But not in the sense of a cheap sales pitch but trying to reach and interest people.

BMC: Some people believe that we are of­ ten so blatant and simplistic in our approach because we want the publicity. Which is true: we want to use the media as a mul­ti­ plier for our work – but it’s not about pro­ moting our name.

CS: Assuming a work is provocative, it tends to develop a dynamic of its own. To what ex­ tent do you feel responsible for what hap­ pens?

what didn’t happen and whether the story has changed over the course of time – or simply to use the survey to put the story back into circulation.

BMC: We often overwhelm ourselves as well as others and usually this is recognised and honored with a lot of goodwill. But with FAL­LADA for example we had to exercise a lot of control. We received requests from TV channels to let them know when we would dump the horse from the helicopter. They blatantly ignored our statement that this would take place to the exclusion of the pu­b­ ­lic, although it was very important to us not to satisfy the curiosity, the voyeurism, we had provoked. We had to be consistent and refuse the spectacular. We could have said: come on everyone, we’re chucking the hor­se out of the helicopter. And then we wouldn’t have done it and could have do­cumented the disappointment on the spot.

CS: Do you conceive of the newspaper re­ ports on this story as part of your work? In the end, what constitutes the body of an art work for you?

RS: But that would have led us away from our original idea and we didn’t want to di­lu­te its impact.

BMC: We could have sold the story to TV but we decided against it because we wanted it to remain a simple rural farce. It is a work with several interesting aspects, the first of which is that the dump was happily pre­ven­ ted and nothing happened because the ar­ tists were stopped from completing their work. But that’s not true, because FALLADA as a whole is an ongoing work, we could still dump the horse and it still lingers in peo­ple’s heads …

CS: Is it important for a work to remain openended?

RS: The uncertainties should remain, yes. In that sense a project like this cannot really come to a close. We’ve thought about doing a telephone survey in the village in ten years time to find out whether people remember

BMC: With FALLADA, the body of work really can’t be grasped to a large extent be­ cause the work happens in people’s heads, including all the terrible thoughts we put there. We think ourselves that a textual en­ ga­gement with all the phenomena that ma­ ni­fested around the work should be in­clu­ded.

For that reason we sent the artist Till Velten out into the provinces. He’s an artist who ba­ sically defines his work as conversations.

We told Till ”do what ya like”, and we have no idea what he’ll come up with. The last bit of news was that he is main­ly talking to a but­ cher about horse meat.

RS: Till’s project was commissioned by Haus am Gern. It will be included in our mo­no­graph as an independent art work. We are inte­res­ ted in creating images, never mind what form they actually take – it is pos­sible for them to really live in people’s heads alone.

CS: Dealing with your work is challenging to audiences and for a curator, collaboration with you implies a certain amount of risk.

You are unpredictable.

BMC: Yes, we lay traps. For ourselves, too.

Ini­tially our proposal for FALLADA to throw the horse from the helicopter only came about because we didn’t want to participate in the exhibition. We didn’t expect the jury to accept such a tasteless idea, so when they said yes we had trapped ourselves and had to deal with the resulting mess for a year.

BMC: Despite all our lust for provocation,

which is a fair enough comment, we never in­tend to humiliate or put down anyone. It’s more an invitation to play.

CS: That involves its own dangers though, for example when you fence in the art mu­ se­um in Solothurn, put up an ambivalent For Sale sign and secretly put it up for sale on­ line …

RS (laughs): We even had some serious buyers interested, from England for example.

BMC: Think of the kid’s game where some­ one disappears unnoticed and suddenly steps out from behind a tree and goes “boo!”

The scare is not intended to be mean or evil but something special. It’s about a child-like attitude to interrupting the everyday. That’s a principle of our work that we can play with as artists and a mechanism that we want to utilise.

RS: That’s why we created Haus am Gern, because it allows us to do these things. Al­ though we don’t want people just to wait for the show effect – that would be a stupid thing to happen because in the end it’s just a byproduct of our content-focused invol­ve­ ment with systems, an issue, a situation or a place, which remains our primary concern.

Andrea Domesle

‘The same procedure as every year ’

For the Greek philosopher Plutarch, the monkey was a useless pet kept by the rich: “A monkey cannot guard your house like a dog; he cannot work like a horse or an ox. He must therefore endure being ridiculed and laughed at by everyone”. 1

The Self Portrait as an Artist Couple is a central component of the work of Haus am Gern. The first of the series marks the year that Barbara Meyer Cesta and Rudolf Steiner came together as an artist couple. The por­traits have been annual companions since then, mirroring their vi­ sion of themselves as artist couple. Every year a new couple-portrait is created alongside numerous other joint works on a great variety of themes and in diverse media. Both had previously worked as artists in­ dividually, which they continue to do parallel to their shared work. The name Haus am Gern, which sounds a bit strange in an art context at first, chimes with their artistic attitude. Think of the everyday phrase ‘hab mich gern’ – ‘like me’ – which in Swiss German means as much as ‘sod you’, that is, a somewhat derisive gesture of distancing from another person. “Haus” also suggests that we are dealing with an institution – ma­ny of the people who continued to receive invitations to exhibitions from Haus am Gern over the years probably believed it to be an ex­hi­ bition space. But this goes beyond a clever self-marketing strategy: for to Barbara Meyer Cesta and Rudolf Steiner the “House” of Haus am Gern is not situated in a vacuum. The four letters G-e-r-n are part of a dis­ used neon sign that they found in their first shared living- and working space, a former twine factory. 2 In 2006 they placed the “Gern” on the ter­ race of their living and working quarters at the time, an empty sanatorium high above the rooftops of Biel. In 2008 Haus am Gern moved again, this time to a former old people’s home – the newly founded studio-

house of the Foundation PasquArt – in the centre of Biel.Their neighbours include the CentrePasquArt and the Photoforum PasquArt as well as the local artists’ union, Visarte Biel.

Thus an initially purely artistic, fictive statement became a part of real life, fulfilling the romantic dream of merging art and life. Life, work and art are closely linked for the artist couple. For the artistic work of Haus am Gern, this relation to everyday life and culture is as important as its en­ ga­gement with the international and regional art scenes. The small scale of the Bern/Biel art scene provides a kind of productive friction for Haus am Gern, and their work is often understood as provocative in this con­ text. The provincial narrowness of the artists’ immediate environment he­re proves inspiring and motivating.

Development of the self-portrait series

The artistic self-portrait has always extended beyond the need to record the appearance of the self for subsequent generations. Since the Re­ nais­­sance, it has been an important tool for artists to define themselves within society and within the art world in particular. From its beginnings, the self portrait served as a tool for self-definition and marketing, as well as a means of critically questioning the artist’s own position. It reflects the artist’s view of his own function between being and ap­pear­ an­ce, reality and idealised image, style and strategy. The best known va­­riant of the self portrait is the representation of a subject through the media of sculpture, painting, photography or drawing, in which objects, gestures and poses transport meaning through a complex system of references.

In their portraits as a couple, Barbara Meyer Cesta and Rudolf Steiner go far beyond this worn-out vocabulary of self portraiture. Their self por­ ­traits as an artist couple may initially be divided into two main ca­te­go­ ries: firstly, there is the group of images in which the artists are recog­ ni­­sably represented; secondly there are those images that do not con­ tain a counterfeit at all. The first group is larger, and can be subdivided

again: there are double-portraits executed completely by the artists, some images that involved others in the production process, and finally those where the business of portraiture was given over to a third party al­together.

The first of these subgroups belongs to the series of quite traditional self portraits. This includes the two images that began the series, where Haus am Gern discovered new potential in the composition and align­ ment of the gaze.The Self Portrait as an Artist Couple (the open chamber) of 1998 was taken with a pin-hole camera. This series is closely linked to the medium of photography and plays on the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer.The hole of the pin-hole camera, an apparatus with a foundational role in the history of photography, functions as a keyhole that confines viewers to a particular viewpoint. The only dimly visible constellations of figures are reminiscent of ancient Indian representations of the Kama Sutra. Gleefully, Barbara Meyer Cesta and Rudolf Steiner explain that the art commission of Bern refused to purchase the series on moral grounds. 3 Although we are familiar with far more explicit images from popular media, we may attribute the refusal of the image to the par­ti­cu­ lar, voyeuristic alignment of the viewer’s gaze. The popular artistic stra­ te­gy “sex sells” didn’t achieve the hoped-for sale here, but it did ge­ne­ra­ te the equally welcome attention.

The next Self Portrait as an Artist Couple, subtitled (we enlarged our colour pictures), also caused a stir for showing bare skin at its first pre­ sen­­tation at Kunsthaus Langenthal in 1999. Here Haus am Gern deal with another taboo topic, that of private snapshots. They re-enacted a photo­ gra­phic series by Annelies Štrba, a well-known Swiss artist who pho­ tographed her children and grandchildren. Barbara Meyer Cesta and Ru­dolf Steiner pose in domestic interiors just like Štrba’s teenage daugh­ ters and son. However, instead of babies they carry cuddly toys in their arms. As viewers, our position is once again determined for us: it is that of the adult surveying the scene from above, except that we are con­ fronted with clearly equally mature adults. With this realisation, our

attitude to the situation is transformed: the charming atmosphere of An­ne­lies Štrba’s pictures shifts towards the pornographic.

Other works also explore the sophisticated potential of photography as a medium 4 and Haus am Gern opened-up their artistic concept to in­te­ grate other people in the production process. In 2000, Barbara Meyer Cesta and Rudolf Steiner had pictures taken of themselves by seven dif­ferent photographic studios in Biel. They left the choice of poses, ges­ tures and studio background to the photographer, who carried out his work in the usual way. The result is seven variations of couples that re­ present the formulaic nature of society’s expectations of images. In 2004, the couple-portrait speedcontrol was created in collaboration with the police. Seated in their car, Barbara Meyer Cesta and Rudolph Steiner triggered a speed camera and later received the police photos, as is stan­dard procedure when paying a fine. While in one of the pictures, Meyer Cesta is at the wheel, in another it is Steiner. The mystery for the practice of photography and every-day life is how the two occurrences could take place at exactly the same time and at the same speed of 143 km/h. In art, this mysterious parallelism is a sign for the joining of two in­dividuals in the unit of the artist-couple.

There is a second main category of double-portraits, namely those that do not depict the artists directly. This includes, for example, the two pen­ ­dants containing the DNA of Barbara Meyer Cesta and Rudolf Steiner that were worn by the staff at the exhibition. Another example is the text installation of 2007 subtitled La Rivoluzione siamo noi. Both works are composed dualistically: their structure is split, dialogical, even contrarian, whereby the artists reveal a conception of their private and artistic collaboration that is based on supplementation, tension and jux­ taposition.

Referencing art history

Numerous works in the series of Self Portrait as an Artist Couple contain references to art history. The work mentioned above, for example, cites

the title of a famous poster by Joseph Beuys from 1972, which shows the artist striding towards the viewer. With Haus am Gern, the sentence inserted on the poster turns into a visual motif, thus abstracting from the personality of the artist(s).Two works from 2003 cite Bruce Nauman’s Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966). The then still unknown Bruce Nauman, who appears here stripped to the waist, gestured towards fountainhead figures from mythological and legendary sources, in order to invoke the secret of artistic inspiration and integrate it with his own lived reality.

Bar­bara Meyer Cesta and Rudolf Steiner align themselves with this atti­ tu­de, spitting water along the way. In order to make the spitting seem even more realistic, the artists appear in transparent LIDI cubes as 3D fa­cial scans. In the medallions that they temporarily inserted on the fa­ çade of the Kunstmuseum Bern, they humorously describe them­selves as “Zeus” and “Athena”. Here the spitting is directed at the main entrance of the art museum, and thus at the visitors and staff of the Kunstmuseum Bern, which was renamed Kunstmuseum Gern at short notice.

Referencing the art system

The engagement with the local art scene is an important driving force of Haus am Gern’s own artistic work. The series of self portraits can also be read with reference to the Swiss art system. Every year Haus am Gern submit their most recent work in this series to the “Christmas Exhibition” of the local art society, which they are entitled to do as mem­bers. They seem to take a roguish pleasure in the resulting discussions with cura­ tors, who often have difficulties understanding the point of their sub­ mission. From 2000 until 2007, they exhibited in this manner at Centre­ PasquArt in Biel/Bienne. In 2008 they found a subversive solution in­ stead, after the resistance to their work had escalated the previous year.

They were able to covertly insert their contribution, subtitled absent, in a very prominent position: the copyright line on the exhibition poster.

The concrete situation of the art scene in this place was therefore an important impetus for their work.

Other Self Portrait as an Artist Couple unmask the function of the art system in general, or integrate it into the structure of the work. This playful strategy began in 2001, when they commissioned painter Claude Hohl from Biel to paint a double-portrait of them. They submitted the result to the Christmas Exhibition, while Claude Hohl submitted a re­ plica. The two identical images were hung in separate rooms. Not only does this doubling mock the notion of originality in painting, it also questions ideas about authorship and the attribution of value. The cheaper of the two paintings found a buyer. 5 Artist couples

Haus am Gern have established an independent, contemporary practice as a couple, comparable to Eva & Adele from Berlin or Gilbert & George from London. For all three, this practice is closely connected to their life as a couple as well as the mechanisms of the art world. But Eva & Adele as well as Gilbert & George use masquerade when appearing at art world events. They invent themselves as artificial figures, while as per­ so­nalities they remain hidden. Haus am Gern, on the other hand, are recognisable as Barbara Meyer Cesta and Rudolf Steiner. A further big difference is that the other duos only exist as a duo in the art scene and the core of their work is the medium of performance. Haus am Gern ma­nage without dressing up and without a stage show. Eva & Adele represent angelic, otherworldly beings in their outfits, while Gilbert & George emphasise clown-like entertainment. Supernatural figures such as the clown also belong among Haus am Gern’s revered idols. In Oh My Gods they also mention the monkey in the same breath as other idols, while in a series of drawings they identify with Tintin and Captain Had­ dock from “The Adventures of Tintin”. Do Haus am Gern thus create an ironic, humorous distance to their own role as artists? Or are they more interested in the integration of caricature into their concept of art? Haus am Gern’s self-articulations as an artist couple are not claims as much as they represent a continuous (re)positioning of themselves in relation to the art scene and the mysterious process of creation.

1

Cited according to Der Affe als Symbol in der Kunst [“The Monkey as a Symbol in Art”], at http://klassische-kunstgeschichte.suite101.de/article.cfm/ der-affe-als-symbol-in-der-kunst 2

The neon letters “Gern” were originally part oft the French word for twine, “Garne”.

3

Haus am Gern in conversation with the author in Biel on 11th August 2010.

4

See Eikon. International Magazine for Photography and Media Art, themed issue: Portraiture, issue 39/40, edited by the author, published by the Austrian Institute for Photography and Media Art, Vienna, 2002 5

The picture submitted by Claude Hohl was sold.

Thomas Schönberger

Transgression as Continuity in the work of Haus am Gern

Taboos and Assaults Late summer 2009, in Bern’s old town.

Some like it, others hate it: Bern’s defining characteristic is its Gemütlichkeit, a comfortable solidity cast in sandstone. Its streets appear dead after the shops close.

While I amble through the arcades, searching for a small gallery in the lower part of the old town, I try to imagine the excitement of the Bernese art scene 40 years ago, with Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle, Markus Raetz and Balthasar Burckhard, Franz Gertsch and Meret Oppenheim, as well as the occasional stay of Sigmar Polke with his legendary Bernese gallerist Toni Gerber, and James Lee Byars’ spectacular interventions right here in the old town. Back then, Bern was the Swiss hot spot of contemporary art, closely linked with the art scenes of Düsseldorf and Cologne. After all this time, we might ask, what remains? Lost in thought, I almost walked past the Duflon Racz Gallery; but how was I to notice it, for the windows were barred with large wooden boards.

When I realised my error and returned, I inspected at the boards more closely: they were individually carved from a single large piece of wood and were connected to the gallery’s opposite wall by wires that criss-crossed the space behind the open windows, thus keeping the wooden object in place without the need for nails. This exhibition by a couple of artists so far unknown to me, with the rather bewildering

name Haus am Gern, was quite literally an object of interest to me.

As coincidences go, soon after I was approached with the offer of working on the monograph of Haus am Gern. An inspiring dialogue with Barbara Meyer Cesta and Rudolf Steiner began to unfold, about the production of art in social spaces and the resistance of museum institutions to specific, situated artistic practices.

However, ‘situated’ does not refer here to the concept of site specificity, which has been worn thin in relation to contemporary art, but to the complex structure of relations and connections that Haus am Gern engages with every new project. For Haus am Gern’s central concern is the cultural and social setting of a place, the concrete circumstances of people’s lives – their sense of belonging, their working conditions, their daily struggles. Haus am Gern investigate this social fabric by involving various social groups in their interventions, which found on a constant transgression of the internal and external boundaries of the art system.1 Haus am Gern therefore employ subversive strategies in accordance with the given situation: what shapes a place? What 1

Foucault, Michel, Hommage à Georges Bataille (1963).

trans. as “A Preface to Transgression”, in Donald F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Countermemory, Practice: selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault, Ithaca: Cornell, 1977, p. 29–52

structures are to be analysed? And finally: how can these systems and social structures be prised open and made visible through artistic work? Because this may be very different according to each specific situation, the work of Haus am Gern is not committed to any particular style. The means used transcend genres and are intermedia, extending from drawing, printing, websites, videos and letters to sculptural elements, installations and traditional exhibition settings.

When in August 2003, a local cultural society and the artist group UNO an­noun­ ced an exhibition of sculpture “in rural space”, Haus am Gern applied with the project Fallada or the Creation of an Urban Legend in Rural Space. The project intended to drop a dead horse from a helicopter onto a tractor parked in a field, with all the necessary permits being obtained beforehand. Surprisingly, the entry was accepted – but neither organisers nor artists expected the wave of outrage that greeted everyone involved in the coming weeks and months. Many of the local farmers may have been understanding had Haus am Gern decided to throw a cow out of a helicopter, but a horse was a different matter. As an iconographical motif, from the equestrian sculptures of antiquity to Renaissance equestrian portraits or as splendid protagonists in historical battles, horses are considered man’s most noble companion.

This apparent aversion to do anything that might harm a horse reminds me of an episode in my former working life at an abattoir in Frankfurt. The first time I slaughtered a horse I was fourteen years old. I was in charge of the emergency shift on a Saturday, a well paid job that was usually unevent­ful; now and again a farmer might bring in an injured cow. But this time was different: the owner of a racing stable

delivered a thoroughbred horse that had stumbled at a military derby and broken both its front legs. It could have been cured, but the owner was impatient. I placed the humane stunner to its forehead and pressed the trigger, then cut its throat and let it bleed. So far this was standard procedure, but the owner had additional demands, so I deboned the carcass and carved it into edible portions. On Monday morning my colleagues were outraged – but why? Was it because I had slaughtered a horse, or because I had dismembered it? I think there is a deep-seated understanding across all levels of society that a horse is funda­men­ tally different from a pig or an ox. Haus am Gern deal with this repulsion and contra­ diction by raising our conscious awareness of it through their artistic intervention. This conscious awareness also determined the degree of reactions: an invi­sible line had been crossed. From animal rights groups such as “Stiftung für das Tier im Recht” (Foundation for the Animal in Law), through the Veterinary Services of the Canton of Bern all the way to the knackers’ yard, the activated groups of people protested in opposition to Haus am Gern’s work, but participated in the work as much as those in support of Fallada.

Initially, news of the planned performance was only spread as a rumor. A rumor is effective partially because of the suspicion that it contains a grain of truth.2 In contrast to gossip, however, the rumor is not focused on individuals; it is a kind of modern legend that spreads like a virus in the everyday tales reported by the media. In Fallada, Haus am Gern deconstruct a short media story about how members of the 2

Kapferer, Jean-Noel: Rumeurs. Le plus vieux média du

monde [ Rumors. The oldest media of the world], especially the chapter: “La rumeur: son public, ses fonctions “[ The rumor, its public and its functions], Éditions Du Seuil, Paris 1987, p. 104 – 111.

Russian air force stole a cow from an island in the Sea of Okhotsk and attempted to take it away by air craft. During the flight, the cow started to panic, causing the crew to drop it from the plane into the sea, where it fell right on top of a Japanese fishing boat and sunk it. The people on the boat mana­ ged to survive, de­man­ded compen­sation from an insurance com­pany and were arres­ ted for attempted insurance fraud, since their story was deemed too unbe­liev­able.

Haus am Gern translated this curious chain reaction to the rural heartlands of Switzer­ land: the open sea became a field, the plane a helicopter, the boat a tractor, the cow a horse. The foundations for the creation of an urban legend in rural space were thus laid. The second step was to find a farmer in the region willing to make a field available for the event. At Hans and Vreni Ruchtis’ farm in Rappers­wil, Haus am Gern found a field as well as two per­sonalities who would develop into veritable players in the enter­prise over the months to come.

The tractor was still missing. Haus am Gern asked every supplier of agricultural machinery in the region, who turned out to be excellent multipliers for the rumor.

Finally, Haus am Gern managed to rent an old tractor of the make Bührer 475 at an outrageous price, providing further cause for talk amongst the farmers.

To get their hands on a dead horse however, proved impossible. After the local knackers’ yard denied the request due to the risk of disease, Haus am Gern put up an adver­ tisement in Kunstbulletin and a free local paper, which read as follows: “Wanted: dead horse for drop onto tractor …”.

Tierwelt, a magazine for animal lovers, refused to even print the ad. In the follow­ ing days, Haus am Gern wrote to all official agencies for permission, including the Federal Civil Aviation Authority (BAZL), the Veterinary Services of the Canton of Bern, the Community Council of Rappers­

wil and so on. All applications as well as the authorities’ replies – which were all negative – were immediately published on Haus am Gern’s website. The Commu­nity of Rapperswil refused permission to fly over a residential area with a so called “belly load” (this was at a time when the media were full of images of helicopters dropping their civil as well as un-civil “belly loads” in Iraq).

When the tractor was parked in the field, farmer Ruchti started spreading a rumor of his own, telling journalists that he had rented his field to the artists for a load of cash, which heated up the discussion further. While the Swiss Equestrian Federa­ tion issued a letter to its members asking them not to make a dead horse available to Haus am Gern, the local press reported on the issue with biting commentaries, Frenchspeaking radio broad­cast an interview; even foreign news media began to show an interest in the story. Various blogging sites dedicated to horses on the internet seethed with anger and Haus am Gern’s inbox was flooded with heavily abusive messages.

Finally a panel discussion in the field was intended to calm down the situation; however, it ended with an ultimatum by the villagers to bring the undertaking to an end, which the artists refused with a reference to their artistic responsibility. Finally, the tractor was stolen from the field – by the Friends of Antique Agricultural Machinery (FAAM), who aimed to protect the old tractor from the horse cadaver.

Haus am Gern’s strategy exploited the extent to which art is accepted in society and involved a whole region in a debate about ethics and the unquestioning pro­ duction and consumption of meat. Even a noble race horse – not to mention other animals – may end at the slaughterhouse or be processed to manufacture glue, after it has fulfilled its primary function.

The restrictive order of public space In May 2007, the Canton of Aargau organised “Labour Month”, which the artists’ collective Kolla­boration Torfeld Süd exploited to draw attention to the planned demolition of an old in­dustrial area that was due to give way to a stadium and a shopping centre. The industrial site accommo­dated studios for artists, designers and architects, and was thus a typical conversion of an urban site that had lost its original industrial func­tion. The group invited Haus am Gern to contri­bute. For the project Drum, Haus am Gern once again put up an ad in a free local paper, seeking an unemployed drummer who would be officially registered to march and drum in the town of Aarau for one month on full pay. The intervention, which seems harmless at first glance, was greeted with deaf ears by the town’s authorities: to walk about town playing loud noise was not permitted, the timing strictly regulated – making music was not allowed for longer than twenty minutes at a time. Workers’ Unions accused Haus am Gern of merely distressing and exploiting an unemployed person as a performing monkey. The association of Aarau shopkeepers, when asked for financial support for the project, refused to acknowledge that the drummer’s activity was ‘work’, a view shared by many of the passers-by who came into direct con­ tact with the drummer. The work Drum gave visibility to specific aspects of a powerful dis­course that is ostensibly about a concern with public order, but is revealed as nothing other than the organised control of urban space propped up by a tight mesh of restrictions. Closely linked to the history of Modernity, these restrictions partition life into the categories of work, transport and leisure, and individuals or groups are a priori suspicious if they evade these underlying patterns or attract attention

through gatherings that the authorities deem unlawful assemblies, or at best unauthorised demonstrations.

This control of urban space is also questioned in the work The Paechbrottree.

In 2008, in the Berlin working class neighborhood of Moabit, Haus am Gern collected up to a thousand pairs of shoes that they knotted together and – with the help of the whole community – threw onto a dead tree on the edge of a disused industrial estate, where a huge shopping centre was to replace the old Paech-Brot bread factory. Not thirty pairs of shoes had hit the tree before the police put a stop to the undertaking on the grounds that constituted a disturbance of public order and on pain of criminal prosecution. The effects of the law against public assembly, which serves to control the crowds, and the restricted freedom of movement in working class neighborhoods, are both clearly demonstrated here.

A similar effect is imaginable with the project Pipifax for Tirana, which is due to take place at the off-space Tirana Art Lab in May 2011 by invitation of the curator Adela Demetija. It will involve a collaborative workshop of Haus am Gern with artists and students of the Tirana Academy on and around Skanderbeg Square, which contains a famous equestrian sculpture of the Albanian national hero. Participants will take photos of signifying surfaces such as street signs, house numbers, advertising posters etc. in the vicinity of the square and replace them with their inverted image.

Afterwards, the participants will appear as extras in a fictive protest movement, enacting a demonstration march with the (symmetrical) Albanian flag and inverted slogans on banners, cardboard cut-outs and t-shirts. This scene will also be photographed and digitally mirrored. The image thus produced will represent reality

the wrong way round, but everything ‘readable’ will remain so – the only thing unchanged will be the Albanian flag.

However, the immediate cause for this demonstration in a location central to Albanian history will not be made apparent, opening up a space to investigate the reactions of public autho­rities and the conditions of movement in urban space as such. The order of events and a making-of, will be documented on video. The option remains that the artistic intervention will take on a life of its own, that passers-by, students and artists will come together in a real demonstration.

The restrictive order of institutional space Since the Christian Church has defaulted as a major sponsor of art production, it only registers marginally in the art system, although its sym­bolism continues to be part of collective con­scious­ness. However, the attitude of catholic priest Mon­seigneur Krystian Gawron, who was invited by Haus am Gern to bless works exhibited at the Kunsthalle Bern in the context of the intervention A Blessing for Art (2001), did not reflect this relative irrelevance.

Although he would never judge a work of art, stated the Monseigneur, he could bless only what was pleasing to God, necessitating that he examine all the works in advance. Only after he had ascertained that there was holiness immanent to all the works in question, did he proceed to bless not merely the works of those artists who had consented but the entire exhibition, thus including those works whose authors had categorically refused the blessing.

In the work A Blessing for Art, Haus am Gern challenge the art system through another powerful system, that of religion.

The aim of the piece was not only to show the Church’s continuing claim to an

evaluative role regarding the production of art, but also to expose the attitudes of artists in view of this spiritual take-over. The disruption of a system succeeds at the moment where another system is involved.

With the work Prize Splash Offer Warp, on the occasion of the award of the art prize of the City of Bern, the prize winners of the year 2003, Haus am Gern, exploited the tradition that the artists them­selves may determine the location for the cere­mo­ny, to make some changes at the Kunst­mu­seum Bern – without permission and on their own terms. A black sheet of fabric that hung from the ceiling in the hallway (to protect the reception staff from the draught) was declared a ready-made (warp), which was generously left to the museum on permanent loan. A smoked ham (offer) was certified with the (faked) seal of the museum and suspended from the ceiling in the stairway, where it corresponded perfectly with the paintings by Albert Anker on the opposite wall. Outside, the sign reading “Kunst­museum Bern” was subtly changed – B became G and “Kunstmuseum Bern” became “Kunstmuseum Gern” (prize), an ironic comment on the power relations between artists and institutions.

Also on the façade, Haus am Gern covered the circular medallions of Zeus and Athena above the entrance with photographic selfportraits (splash), in which Barbara Meyer Cesta and Rudolf Steiner were portrayed in a remake of Bruce Nauman’s Self Portrait as a Fountain.

The challenges to the institution of the museum also include a series of works that Haus am Gern placed at CentrePasquArt in Biel/Bienne. Initially, the invitation to exhibit at CentrePasquArt is an offer one can’t refuse. In 2002, newly elected director Dolores Denaro held the keys to a new building but without money for an exhibition pro­gram. The costs for the

exhibition therefore quietly fell on the invited artists. Haus am Gern made this unpleasant situation the starting point of their work Musée en Grève, a rallying cry that Barbara Meyer Cesta had brought back from a studio residency in Paris, where massive reductions in salaries and running costs had led to demons­tra­tions under the slogan Musée en Grève (museum on strike). Would it go too far to cite the Centre­PasquArt in Biel as an example for a misguided politics of the museum that has spread throughout Europe? The fact remains that high infrastructure costs force institutions to out­source the exhibition funding to the participating artists.

The slogan Musée en Grève was intended to stretch across the glass façade of the newbuild, while the walls in the foyer were sold as advertising space to artists and other institutions to raise funds for the exhibition. This ad campaign spread the news of the financial problems at Centre­ PasquArt through­out the Swiss art scene.

At the same time, Musée en Grève contributed to a solution for some of the museum’s substantial issues. But as is often the case when art production extends the boundaries set by the institution, this led to a dispute with the director, who in turn was worried about political sanctions. In the end, a compromise was reached: the letters G and E had to be painted over and MUSEE EN GREVE became MUSE EN REVE: the muse dreams. Haus am Gern had succeeded in questioning the status of the museum institution by invoking the much cited ‘freedom’ of art. By giving way to the demand for censorship by the museum manage­ment, Haus am Gern actually made that censorship visible for the museum’s visitors.

In 2004, CentrePasquArt asked Haus am Gern for a documentation of the project Fallada for exhibition in the international group show I Need You, about the

relationship of art and its public. Haus am Gern rejected this with the argument that one cannot document one’s own work without it losing some of its impact. They therefore con­ceived a new work with the title Fallada 475, a 25 meter long glass case containing a paper scroll of the same length with about 70 drawings on the themes of violence, horses and tractors. Shortly before the opening, Haus am Gern entered the CentrePasquArt masked as members of the Ku Klux Klan, smashed the glass case with a hammer, smeared the number 475 on the wall in black paint, and disappeared after just a few minutes. A video of the action was then shown in the exhibition. This act of destruction was intended to bring the museum-going public into direct proximity with the sheer negative force that had issued from animal rights campaigners and horse lovers during the project Fallada and which was directed against Haus am Gern and other participants.

Show us Buy us Sell us (2009, Galerie DuflonRacz, Bern) was the first exhibition

by Haus am Gern in a commercial gallery.

The goal was to create a spatial situation inside as well as outside the gallery space, which included various points of attack on the local art system. The windows of the gallery were barricaded with wooden boards, thus rendering it unrecognisable as a gallery space at first glance. The gallery lost its specific ‘look’ as a place of art and appeared inaccessible to visitors, more like a construction site. Inside the gallery, however, drawings of selected art institutions in the Canton of Bern hung on the walls. These drawings showed the various galleries, museums and exhibition spaces subject to processes of destruction – here a digger tore down an illustrious façade, there a well-known gallery was used as a waste dump. Once again, the institu­ tions involved did not hold back with criticism, since they perceived the drawings

by Haus am Gern as direct assaults on their organisation, their buildings and their work. However, it was these same art institutions as well as private collectors who sub­se­quently acquired the drawings.

Classical Communication The material equivalence of attention is monetary value.3 Faktura, a work from 2001, plays with the limited amount of attention that the players within the art system (the managers of exhibition spaces, gallerists, museum directors, art critics) can or want to devote to artists. Haus am Gern turned this situation on its head – and thus managed to elicit a high degree of attention from precisely the art world players it addressed. Based on the formula ‘time is money’, Steiner and Meyer Cesta charged for exactly the amount of time in minutes and hours during which they had thought about every single one of the 123 selected protagonists of the art world. Haus am Gern sent out the bills (here described using the antiquated German term Faktura) – a clear challenge to operative mode of art system. The amount of confu­sion that the bills were able to generate enforced the point. Reactions differed – some of the individuals or institutions promptly paid, while others refused all further contact.

When reminders were sent out after the payment period had passed, some even threatened legal action.

Like Faktura, Blanko is a work based on commu­nication via mailed letters. In the

context of the annual Christmas Exhibition,4 the largest space at Centre­­PasquArt, the Salle Poma, hosts the special exhibition x-mas+. This show is always curated by the director of the museum, who is also responsible for selecting the artists. For x-mas+2002 Haus am Gern applied with the project Blanko. Blanko was a letter to the same recipients as Faktura, kindly requesting them to sign and return the stamped postcard included in the envelope.

Over half the recipients did as they were asked. Haus am Gern intended to apply the enlarged signatures to the walls of the Salle Poma. However, Blanko did not pass selection by the director. The second stage of the work then consisted in sending a rejection letter to all participants. Since Bernhard Fibicher, the then director of the Kunsthalle Bern, had only invited artistcollectives to the Christmas Exhibition that year, the signatories of Blanko were simultaneously informed that they were now part of the Haus am Gern Artist Collective. The work Blanko Reloaded at Kunsthalle Bern consisted of a leatherbound book containing the signatures of all those now belonging to the Haus am Gern Artist Collective. The gilded cover was imprinted with the names of the parti­ cipants. The book was offered for sale at a rate corresponding to the price of gold that day and the settlement of account from the sale, which recorded a minus of 54 Swiss francs on the production costs of the book (later paid by the artists’ society Young Responsible Artists, YRA), was sent to all participants in the Haus am Gern Artist Collective. The fascination of the piece lies in the dilemma the CentrePasquArt placed itself in: by rejecting Blanko, the institution

3 See Franck, Georg: Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit, especially the following chapter: Zur Ökonomie der Selbstwertschätzung, p. 75-79, Carl Hanser Verlag: Munich, 1998. Unfortu-

4 At exhibition halls in Switzerland, the annual Christmas

nately, Franck’s book has never been translated into English.

Exhibition traditionally shows work by local artists selected by a

An accessible essay in English summarising his key precepts may

jury or by the director of an institution. It is a much debated

be read online at http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/5/5567/1.html

fixed-point on the art calendar.

passed over the singular opportunity of adorning their walls with the signatures of Swiss luminaries of the art world such as Bice Curiger or Harald Szeemann.

Gathering these together in a Christmas Exhibition might have brought significant renown to the museum.

Two years later, Haus am Gern developed the work Key for x-mas+2003; a locked, ornamental, iron gate at the entrance to the otherwise empty Salle Poma with the inscription “the director has the key”, which refers to the proverbial key function of the director, whose subjective decisions finally determine what is shown in the museum and what isn’t. Perhaps the play of words was too obvious, for this work could also not be realised. In winter 2005, Haus am Gern once again participated in the com­ petition for x-mas+, this time with the plan to import the giant, golden fluorescent-light crown, the trademark of Rolex that towers above the town of Biel, into the Salle Poma.

The world famous watch maker was con­ tacted, but Haus am Gern were aware that while the firm has its production centre in Biel, it does not support the local art scene, preferring to concentrate on spectacular artsponsoring events world­wide. Haus am Gern thus included the proposition that if Rolex did not reply to their request, the artists would then be forced to make a Rolex Logo from cheap materials and exhibit this model instead. Although there was a chance for the director to gain Rolex as a possible new partner for the Centre­PasquArt, neither Rolex nor the museum management were prepared to play the game. Rolex even threatened legal action. The museum lost the opportunity to gain media exposure through a ridiculous trial, and the lazy reluc­tance of the institution to engage with other systems within society – for example, by entering into cooperation with busi­ nesses beyond the dependence on classical sponsorship – was amply demonstrated.

Empty and occupied spaces For Lifetime Europe in 2005, Haus am Gern leased an allotment garden from the small garden association Anger-Crottendorf e.V. in Leipzig, the birth place of the allotment garden movement. The small parcel of land included a gazebo, in which a second, sealed and climactically controlled space was in­ stalled. The only accesses to the in­side of the space are the four windows that allow viewers to observe the interior with­out, how­ ever, entering it. After the puri­fi­ca­tion and sealing of the space by a specialist com­pany that otherwise manages clean­rooms for the production of digital chips, research labora­ to­ries or car factories, Haus am Gern decla­ red the dust free space to be a history free space that was to last for eternity. A new function was thus given to a place that was considered, for the better part of two cen­tu­ries, the retreat of a socially disad­van­ta­ged class.

The history free space may be read as a re­ fe­rence to the social isolation of the wor­king class; artistic production here advances into a grey zone of cultural life that does not include art production in its social sphere.

Thus the statutes of working class associa­ tions rarely mentioned artistic activity, and the institutions of the art world seemed distant and inaccessible. Engels was among the first to criticise the garden colony as a retreat from urban daily life that unnecessa­ rily detracts from the struggle for the inte­ rests of the working class.5 It was only quite late that the SED6 recognised the 5 Friedrich Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), Penguin Classics Edition, London: Penguin, 2006.

For the original German see Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels - Werke.

Dietz Verlag, Berlin. vol. 18, 5., 1973, Berlin/DDR. p. 209–287.

6 SED stands for Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (Socialist Unity Party of Germany). Until the collapse of the

advantages of these suspect places of retreat, and accepted small garden colonies as the abodes of loyal citizens, who would be devoted to tending their vegetables and not to a critique of those in power.7 Lifetime Europe is thus a vacant space, conserved for all time, within a bustling social place.8 However, the history free space is also equivalent to the traditional museum vitrine, the final resting place in which all is conserved and protected from the outside world.9 The cleanroom is the inversion of the ‘experiential space’10 and plays with the conservation values of the white cube and its exclusory dominance, its reminiscence of sacral spaces. The tension of the work is generated in the hermetic enclosure of this space at the socially charged place of the allotment garden association.11 German Democratic Republic in autumn 1989 the SED was the only political party in the GDR. 7 Dietrich, Isolde: Hammer, Zirkel, Gartenzaun. Die Politik der SED gegenüber den Kleingärtnern. [Hammer, sickle, picket fence: the politics of the SED towards small-hold gardeners], Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt 2003 8 For the differentiation of ‚space ‘and ‚place‘ see: de Certeau, Michel: The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkley: University of California Press (second edition, 2002), Part III Spatial Practices, p. 91 ff.

9 Despite the frequency with which Brian Doherty’s Inside the White Cube is cited today, the problems that arise from a return of art to the gallery space are still most incisively analysed in his chapter ‘The gallery as a gesture’, p. 87 in: O’Doherty, Brian Inside the White Cube: the ideology of the gallery space, Berkley: UCP, 2006 .

10 I am referring here to works by Thomas Hirschhorn or Pipilotti Rist, whose immersive installations may be described as appealing primarily to viewer’s subjective experiences in a space

Cultural difference or the Jurassic conflict in Je ne sais quoi Je ne sais quoi, a work from 2007, engages with the supporters and detractors of the separation of the Canton of Jura from the Canton of Bern and exposes the perma­nent­ ly shifting frontiers in the processes of cultural and national formation. Je ne sais quoi exemplifies the dynamic of how a separatist movements can act as a trigger for counter-movements towards integration.

If a special sense of belonging to a group is voiced to define a cultural unity, striving towards nationhood (or self-governance) is a next step, the need to define criteria for exclusion will also arise. The process of separation is implicitly also one of cultural and social exclusion. The problems that result from this duality of inclusion/ exclusion demonstrate clear anti-Modernist tendencies. As the sociologist Vera Indermaur-Hänggi emphasises, separatist movements that strive for an ethnically motivated separation, differ considerably from other emancipatory movements in support of the environment, women’s rights or the rights of minorities.12 The separation of the predominantly catholic northern Jura from the protestant southern Jura, which remained part of the canton of Bern by popular vote following dert [‘Objects of Contemplation – Places of Experience: on the changing concept of art in the 20th century’], in: Topos Raum Die Aktualität des Raumes in der Gegenwart, Akademie der Künste (Hg.), Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nürnberg 2005, p. 53. (not available in English) 12 see Indermaur-Hänggi, Vera: Der Jura-Konflikt, Online

determined by the artist.

Pu­blications, Soziologisches Institut der Universität Zürich, 1997,

11 Kudielka, Robert: Gegenstände der Betrachtung – Orte der

vinder1.htm

Erfahrung Zum Wandel der Kunstauffassung im 20. Jahrhun-

p.1, available online (in German) at http://socio.ch/movpar/t_

the foundation of the Canton Jura in 1978, led to a new problem: today, the separatist movement of the Béliers (meaning ram or battering ram) fights for the unification of the two parts in a new Canton of ‘Greater Jura’. At the centre of the conflict that Haus am Gern engages with in Je ne sais quoi, is the occasionally violent campaign of the Béliers, the militant youth wing of the separatist movement, who have drawn attention to their cause with spectacular acts of resistance since the 1960s. It’s an obvious and correct conclusion that the Béliers foster close contacts with other separatist movements in Europe who are equally versed in symbolism, such as the Basque ETA, which promotes the repressed language of the Basque people, Euskarak, as a common cultural bond. The Jura region, too, is characterised by a radical duality. As in the Basque country, the tendency towards nationhood is intertwined with the history of the region as a safe haven for anarchists. Bakunin lived here, as did the German anarchist August Reinsdorf, who was executed in 1885 for his assassi­ nation attempt on the German Kaiser and spent many years before that agitating from his base in the Jura. So the conflict blends anarchist, world-encompassing ideas of revolution with separatist tendencies of nation building that include creating local cultural and symbolic values. This is the route taken by the Béliers, who emphasise their difference by using the French language (and the Jurassic Pâtois) as well as creating a symbol of their distinction from German-speaking Bern. When the Swiss Army, at the behest of the canton of Bern, destroyed an old mill in the northern Jura in 1973 in order to set up a military training ground; a large mill wheel re­ mained. Two soldiers stole it and sold to an architect, who incorporated it as an orna­ ment in the façade of a building belonging to the Cantonal Bank of Bern. After the northern Jura had separated from Bern in

1978, the Béliers once again stole the wheel in 1996, or in their view, repatriated it in to the new Canton. The Cantonal Bank of Bern offered to sell the wheel to the Béliers for a symbolic amount of one Swiss franc, in order to spare the bank any legal and political complications. The Béliers refused the deal on the grounds that they would not buy anything that rightly belonged to them.

Since then, the Béliers have kept the wheel hidden in the Canton of Jura and protected it from all government intervention, with the aim of one day placing it as a monu­ ment to Christian Bader, a young man who lost his life in a failed bomb attack in Bern.

The Béliers have repeatedly demanded that the government of the Canton of Jura declare the wheel, which has become known as the “Roue de Bollement”, part of the Canton’s cultural heritage. The Cantonal government however refuses this demand because they cannot see or examine the wheel in question, and because stolen property cannot legally be declared cultural heritage. Further, the Canton would then be liable to return it to its rightful owner, the Cantonal Bank of Bern. Haus am Gern have no sympathies with either party in this long-standing conflict, but merely offer Je ne sais quoi as a platform where the antagonists may present their concerns. Within this conflict, Haus am Gern adopt a position of radical neutrality.

Even though the Jura conflict had few victims compared to the troubled 1970s in Germany, we may draw a comparison to Hans-Peter Feld­man’s cycle of photographs The Dead, in which the dead (perpetrators and victims alike) of the RAF are documented but not judged.13 Like Fallada, the work Je ne sais quoi had effects far beyond the art context. Starting 13 Die Toten Hans Peter Feldmann RAF, APO, Baader Meinhof: 1967–1993 Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main.

with the historical research into the conflict, Haus am Gern were able to involve the diverging sides in the process. In a straightforward exhibition the Béliers, as well as a representative of the Cultural Department, explained their perspectives on a pre-industrial tool that had somehow become a cultural treasure over the decades, while the object in question has remained invisible throughout.

Note: On 3rd September 2010 – shortly before the present monograph went to press – the Béliers installed the “Roue de Bolle­ ment” in the centre of St. Brais with a formal celebration honoring Christoph Bader. The installation near the “Hôtel du Soleil”, where Bader grew up, was con­ sented to by the community council but not given permission by the cantonal govern­ ment. Haus am Gern were invited to the celebration and is mentioned on the plaque of honor. Haus am Gern in turn invited Ernst Häusermann, who had stolen, or saved, the cogwheel in 1973. To everyone’s surprise, as a present he brought a wheel from the mill at Bolle­ment, which he had used as a garden ornament. Béliers’ speaker Marc Freléchoux and Ernst Häusermann shook hands in conciliation.

Invitation to play – participation in unprotected space Although the history of performance art’s differentiation as an art form since the sixties has been characterised by the increasing involvement of spectators in the artistic process, this form of participation usually took place within securely established boundaries of the art context.

We might name some examples of works here that on the one handsecured the status of the ‘involved spectator’ over the years,

on the other hand displaced it.14 These range from the questionnaire given to gal­le­ry visitors in SoHo – a statistical investigation of the social composition of the audience – in Hans Haacke’s study John Weber Gallery Visitors’ Pro­file 1 from 1972, to Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures since the late 1980’s, which reduce parti­cipants to extras in a slap stick comedy,15 to Rirkrit Tiravanija, who has been cooking Thai noodles in museums and galleries since the nine­ties.

The participation of the viewer in the production of art works has by now become a fixed component of ‘exhibitions of the spectacle’. It is irrelevant whether these are socially tinged works, like Thomas Hirschhorn’s involvement with socially disadvantaged youths at Documenta 11, satisfying a well-heeled audience’s lust for authenticity, or Olafur Eliasson’s ever more gigantic productions between art and natural spectacle, which evoke a contemplative emotional state. All such productions pander to an ancient, vain desire: the yearning for direct access to art without the irritating byways of reflection, acquisition of knowledge and discourse. It is sympto­matic for all the art works mentioned above that the public participated precisely because the white 14 See Groys, Boris: A Genealogy of Participatory Art, p. 18-31: Exhib.-Kat.: The Art of Participation 1950 to Now, Rudolf Frieling (Ed.); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2008.

15 See Schneemann, Peter J.: Anweisung, Beobachtung und Nachricht. Rollenspiele für die Rezeptionsästhetik, in: Welt-BildMuseum. Topographien der Kreativität (Festschrift for Professor Ekkehard Mai) [Publication of conference papers, symposium at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museums Cologne and the Fondation Corboud Cologne in collaboration with the Institute of Art History at the University of Cologne with the title ‘Welt-BildMuseum. Topographien der Kreativität’, 29. to 31. January 2009], Cologne: Böhlau, 2010. (in print).

cube guaranteed that they were safely dealing with works of art.16 The participatory gestures of Haus am Gern are opposed to this simplified concept of art. Haus am Gern go a decisive step further by bringing the clinical white cube back into the confines of society. If taboos are silent agreements that only become apparent the moment they are broken, then the transgression of those taboos is necessary in order to make cultural, moral and social boundaries visible. That is why Haus am Gern’s practice is situated and why it is essential for them to keep engaging with the structural properties of a particular place.

16 For the discussions surrounding participatory strategies, see for example Nicolas Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Presses du rÊel, 2002 und Jacques Rancière: The Emancipated Spectator, London:Verso 2009

“Haus am Gern is a real fiction, as possible and yet uncertain as the question of whether the storks will return this year�

Annelise Zwez

Chri Frautschi *1969, runs the art space lokal-int in Biel Bienne, where he also lives. www.lokal-int.ch Trmasan Bruialesi *1956 in Tbilissi, Georgia and studied Slavistics with a fo­cus on ancient Slavic texts of early Christianity. Sin­ce 1989 he has worked in Berlin as a translator, au­thor and musician.

Claudia Spinelli *1964, lives and works in Basel. She is an author and curator. Before becoming director of Kunst­raum Baden in 2009, she was a freelance art critic for the Neue Zür­ cher Zeitung and the Weltwoche and from 1996 – 2000 she managed the Kleine Helmhaus as well as the Galerie Walcheturm in Zürich. As guest cu­ra­tor she has pro­du­ ced exhibitions at Château de Nyon, Kunsthaus Basel­ land and P.S.1 in New York amongst others. She first colla­borated with Haus am Gern in 2008 for the ex­hi­ bition Real Estate at Kunstmuseum Solo­thurn, where the work “N.I.M.B.Y – Not In My Back­yard” was rea­ lised.

Rolf Bismarck *1961, lives and works in Basel, is Claudia Spinelli’s lifeand occasionally working-partner. Origi­nally a jour­na­ list, he worked for n-tv, the first German news channel.

He was involved with the exhibitions Re­processing Rea­ lity at Château Nyon and P.S.1 as co-cu­ra­­­tor, and with Real Estate as an author.

Andrea Domesle Curator, cultural manager and art historian with several years experience in an international context. Artistic Di­ rector of Kunsthalle Palazzo in Liestal/Basel. Lecturing positions at art schools in Usti nad Labem (Czech Re­ pub­­lic), Basel and Zurich.

Thomas Schönberger Studied art history in Hamburg and is currently research fellow at the Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Institute of Art History, University of Bern. His re­ search focuses on artistic interventions in urban space and the relations between subcultures and the art sys­ tem.

Annelise Zwez *1947 in Biel/Bienne. She studied hu­manities in Gre­no­ ble, Cambridge, and Zurich. Since 1972, she has been ac­tive as an art critic for general and specialist pub­li­ cations in Switzerland and abroad, and has contributed numerous texts for catalogues, books, and encyclopedias.

Annelise Zwez lives in Twann on La­ke Bienne.

Till Velten *1961, lives and works in Berlin and Basel. He studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Fritz Schweg­­ler. In 2006/7, he was Professor at Kunsthoch­schule Kas­sel, and since 2008 Director of the MA pro­gramme “Art in Public Spheres” at Lucerne Univer­si­ty of Applied Sciences and Arts. He works with video, audio and in­stal­la­tion.

Peter Vittali The Art Process Inspector of Haus am Gern, to whom a separate booklet of this monograph is dedicated. In this role, he is the author of many pre­sentations and per­ formances in conjunction with Haus am Gern. But that is not all. Regarding his CV, he simply re­­­­s­ponds: www. openfocus.ch. This is simple and complex simul­ta­neous­ ly, as he believes that the work itself is the only CV that is truly worth the effort. Occasionally, he adds: “You can observe a lot, just by watching”.

— stork images: www.storch-schweiz.ch