Nowiswere Issue 7

NOWISWERE CONTEMPORARY ART MAGAZINE

ISSUE 7 JULY 2010

Cover commissioned by Veronika Hauer

nowiswere was founded in January 2008.

Copyrights of the magazine are the property of Veronika Hauer & Fatos Üstek. All rights of the contributions are the property of their contributors.

Impressum: Editors: Veronika Hauer & Fatos Üstek Layout: Rudolf Steckholzer & Veronika Hauer Contributors: Soledad Garcia-Saavedra,Veronika Hauer, Per Hüttner, Adeena Mey, Jacopo Miliani, Robert Müller, Margit Neuhold, Astrid Peterle, Lisa Skuret, Fatos Üstek, Niki Weitzer and Florian Zeyfang.

Editorial comments and proofreading: Mary Jane Miltner, James White Contact: info@nowiswere.com www.nowiswere.com

TH Trashy Gridic............................................................................4 Soledad García-Saavedra EF Mapping the Gap between Olympism and the production of the Olympic Machine.......................7 Margit Neuhold TH Phantastic Pessimism..................................................................12 Niki Weitzer CC Holography for Beginners....................................................14 Lisa Skuret TH New York 1989 Paris is Burning, A tribute.........................19 Jacopo Miliani CC 56th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen...........24 Veronika Hauer, Adeena Mey TH Horizons (Tableau)...............................................................29 Florian Zeyfang AS On Helmut Heiss..................................................................34 Robert Müller CC The Artist Is Present (and Gives an Audience)...................41 Astrid Peterle THematics: hosting texts up to 1000 words or image material of up to four pages focusing on a single theme.

EF Expecting Future: sub section of THematics, hosting texts pointing out possibilities of future and positioning the potentials of the to-come-true. As expecting future requires awareness of the present, the section will be the gathering of the today’s variety of practices, attitutes, tendencies...

AS Artist Specials: hosting evaluations on or interviews with artists.

CC Critics’ Corner: hosting reviews on current exhibitions, performances, events, happenings...

SF 0K - A Play in Five Acts.........................................................48 Per Hüttner, Fatos Üstek

TRASHY GRIDIC

Soledad García-Saavedra

But can this formal grid sufficiently reduce the heterogeneity of the trash, its utter difference, so that a coherent story, and hence history, can emerge?

Sven Spieker, The Big Archive, Art from Bureaucracy

DATA During the 1970s a number of publications and exhibitions discussed the grid as a catalyst consisting of subjects and mechanisms for the analysis of Minimal art, specifically painting and sculpture in the United States. While art critics John Ederfield1 and Rosalind Krauss2 used in depth the grid to (un)inform the connotations of an aesthetic decree through structural methodology for minimal artworks, the curator and art critic Lucy Lippard3 addressed the state of difference among artworks and the artists’ proposals which participated in the show Grids, Grids, Grids…(1972). Rather than compressing their works into “ridiculous generalizations and producing artificial connections” her choice was to introduce artists’ thoughts in the exhibition’s catalogue. Lippard recognized the grid principle as “an arbitrary framework on which to build an entity, a selfrestrictive device by which to facilitate choice…”4 “… an armature for a variety of style means and contents.”5 Her open interpretation about grids stands on the resistance to condense artworks and artists’ statements in a purist or stylistic brand with the aim to verbalise visual device. On the opposite side, Krauss asserted the grid as a supreme mythological power6 and thereby, its historical success in visual arts. While Krauss insisted and spread the cult to the grid through method and historical knowledge, Lippard dismantled the discourse looking for dissimilarities in the quality of art practises.

MEMORANDA The tracking of these authorial positions and its brief outlines in visual arts reflects not only a singular tale-discourse of grids with capital G, but also gives an introduction to the constraints that grids reserved in their bivalent use for the dissemination of knowledge TH - 4

production. This particular function implied an oscillation between universal applications, totalising visions or logical organization and the inclusion of deviant explanations and exceptional states with the potentiality of limitless interpretations. In other words, the concrete mode of the grid enabled to operate in a constant process of a coherent truth and the demythologisation of its certainty. But how does it work this constant process?

Does it predict an iteration of outcomes and its continual absorption or can it evolve to other spaces and productions? To clarify, these issues penetrate into the diffuse terrain of grids. Although they differ in times and contexts, the streamline I would like to acknowledge stands not only in the tensions of its knowledge production as my snapshot-discourse of Minimal art in the 1970s portrays, but on the essential strain between mind and experience and their disparity space left behind: the remainders or the trash.

Usually appointed as efficient systems, grids concede and guaranty stability and order7 in the diverse social relations with the Western world and its humankind. More than a visible presence, they prevail in an absent and unconscious force that allows a pragmatic parameter of measure and equivalence between things. Yet, grids cover-up a sense of law embraced in a permanent negotiation between the forces of nature and reason or what I call the gridic8, the essential laws constructed by social structures. The awareness of this term, enabled to explore the set of conditions and rules attributed to grids and precipitates the attempt to subvert and emancipate in thought, acts and experience its dictation. A sceptical reader can deduct that the premise of transgression to imposed system and ideas by the grid contains a fine line of natural reoccupation by it.

In perceptible and known situations of the art world, a counter-discourse or a critical art practise is necessarily integrated to the capital value of institutions (museums, biennales, galleries, magazines, etc). But this pattern is shaped through conventions and behaviours that converge in a two-fold movement: while institutions preserve the challenge of its progressive improvement towards their thirsty public, they reject any useless, inadequate, unproductive and disorganised element. As Sarat Maharaj accurately expressed, is the condition of the grid-epistemic filter “what it cannot stomach, drops out of sight”9. To swallow or include unusual, unlike or disparate identities, the process asserted by Maharaj, implies their conversion into a homogeneous and simplified model, a law of equivalence that transforms its excluded and original form into an assimilated and comprehensible retinal shape. That is when a coherent and true story can emerge; that is when dissimilar images and cultures are translated into text, when striking organisms are adapted to mathematical representation, when memory becomes enounced in a scientific rubric or when you perhaps, can recognize the preliminary Minimal art-tale-discourse of the 1970s in a logical and oppositional narrative. Then the alleviating expressions throws question of the transformable space of filter or where it is processed every act, is it possible to turn clear this diffuse filter zone? Certainly, one response encapsulates a process of failure, which for some believers10 means success. Scratching and digging into the sensitive grid-law, the gridic, may accede to traces of myths or the paradise of paradoxes; an infinite spectrum of forgotten and absurd accounts that in a particular time and space are rescued from its bin to make sense. Rather than being an eternal iteration of exact commonplaces, it promotes continual layers of difference interrogating structures of power and discrepancy in thoughts and experiences. If the gridic identifies its limit it starts with the trash, a messiness and disorder that will enunciate and emancipate stability through its, and for, failure.

1 See Grids by John Elderfield on Artforum, May, 1972 2 See essay Grids, You Say by Rosalind Krauss. Exhibition Grids, format and image in 20th Century Art at The Pace Gallery, New York,1979 3 See essay Top to Bottom, Left To right by Lucy Lippard. Exhibition GRIDS, GRIDS, GRIDS,… at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1972, p.5 4 Ibid., p.5 5 Ibid., p.1 6 As Krauss states: “Success here refers to the three things at once: a sheerly quantitative success, involving the number of artists in this century who have used grids; a qualitative success through which the grid has became the medium for some of the greatest works in modernism; and an ideological success, in that the grid is able -in a work of whatever quality-to emblematicize the modern.” Grids you say, 1979 7 To have a broad scope of the diverse functions and meanings of grids, see Hannah Higging’s The Grid Book, MIT Press, 2009 8 The term has been previously explored in the essay The Gridic: On Morton Feldman’s Projection scores and Richard Hamilton’s exhibition Growth and Form, Journal Rubric, Issue 2, 2009 ISSN 2041-613X 9 Maharaj, Sarat, Unfinishable Sketch of “an unknown object in 4D” scenes of artistic research, Lier en Boog, Vol. 18, No. 1, 2004 10 Among them, Samuel Beckett’s poetry and Morton Feldman’s music compositions.

AGAIN Trashy gridic is a concept enunciated in Santiago, Chile, in 2010. It revolves on the divergent discourse of art theory and practice during the 1970s in the United States. It pays attention to texts and exhibitions of Minimal art disseminated under the umbrella of grids to recall its forgetfulness from the trash.

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Mapping the Gap between Olympism and the production of the Olympic Machine.

Glancing to the XXI Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver.

Margit Neuhold I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates Goodwill between nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if they didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympics, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles…. At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare.

George Orwell1

Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, Torino 1938

The subject of this short essay is the global operation of the Olympic Industries from an activist point of view.

To understand the importance of this issue, I will briefly outline the Games’ history and the socio-political structures, which encouraged their growth. One is immediately faced with the gap between the noble ‘Fundamental Principles of Olympism’ stated in the Olympic Charter and the actual production of the Olympic agency. Contemporary cities compete to host the mega-spectacle - which presupposes a precise functioning infrastructure informing a set of mechanisms operating on its social and territorial production - in an entrepreneurial mode.The last Winter Games in Vancouver serve as a model to investigate the Games’ production on its macro and micro level, the neighbourhood’s struggle for a different urban reality.

The modern Games started in Athens in 1896 and it is said that the first true modern Games took place in London in 1908. The French aristocrat Pierre de Courbetin, the driving force behind the Olympic Games, wanted, with his holistic understanding of the Olympics, to reform the educational system through sports intending to gain both enthusiasm for ancient Greek culture and a healthy mind and body. He pursued internationalism by inviting athletes from around the world to participate and hoped to achieve peace through sport.2 Situating Pierre de Courbetin’s Olympism in the wider socio-political framework reveals that he was part of an emerging biopolitical movement at the beginning of the 20th Century. Foucault sets out to define biopower as “a set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power.”3 This shift of production towards life by way of introducing sports and leisure on an institutional level the extended arm of sovereign power - manifests itself in various forms: it emphasizes outdoor activities and travelling, the institutionalisation of sports and political as well as economic interests towards efficacy and the strength of the body.

Throughout various regimes such body politics operated in a multifaceted way and strategically empowered disciplinary and military mechanisms.This reflected and produced radical notions of modernity: industrial civilization through introduction of apparatuses for health and sports, standardization of the social field through segmentation and additional codification, orientation towards progress in technologies, economies (particularly through efficiency and rational approaches) and military power.

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In Victorian England the Muscular Christianity (1837– 1901) movement stressed physical strength and health, an energetic Christian activism, as an ideal of masculinity. It was believed that physical fitness was important for the formation of one’s moral character. It was also around this time that sports classes were widely introduced in schools. Mass gymnastics and tourism became a tool for codification, and gaining control over public leisure. Different political regimes developed instruments to mobilize masses towards an active lifestyle industrializing popular health. In Italy Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (1925) was the Fascist leisure and recreational organization, which primarily addressed working class people. In Germany the Hitler Regime introduced Kraft durch Freude (1933–1945), which meant longer holidays and a movement back to nature hiking and travelling.This lead to a boom in the tourism industry.The call for mobilisation ran through diverse social strata and juveniles became part of the ‘Hitler Jugend,’ the paramilitary youth organisation of the Nazi Party. The powerful illusion was that everyone could take part.

Such ideas stress on the social utility of bodily strength and their practice concurrently consume leisure-time.

‘Compulsory’ entertainment is geared towards disindividualization, massification and opens sport and leisure to commodification. The mass produced dream of individualism becomes a stereotyped appropriation; it mockingly supports the system of a unified culture with an imposed morality (voluntary work, to benefit the community, bodily strength). Moreover, such mass production requires an enormous managing and controlling apparatus; stratafication, codification, and commodification are produced for this system to function.

From the video: Resist 2010: Eight Reasons to Oppose the 2010 Winter Olympics, by No2010.com & Burning Fist Media, May 2009.

15 min. 45 sec.

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The participation of millions of people worldwide produces identical needs in infinite places, which are to be satisfied with identical goods. This type of operation places the consumers’ needs first, which explains the lack of resistance to this operating system. Furthermore, the technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points demands organisation and planning by management. The result is a circle of manipulation and retroactive need which strengthens the system even more.4 This is only a part of what Theodore W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer investigate to reveal the coherence of the growing circle of culture and leisure industries and of how those demand management and control.

Their arguments circulate around mass mobilisation catalyzed by morality and commodification towards standardisation, control and consumption that center around the concept of the individual (which has never been fully achieved).5 Most significant is the term ‘Olympic Growth Machine’ which derived from an investigation on Games situated in contemporary conditions.6 Such a development cannot be overestimated.

The first Summer Youth Olympic Games (YOG) will open on 14th August 2010 in Singapore followed by the first winter YOG in Innsbruck (Austria) in 2012.

This manufacturing of Olympism as a global commodity is based on its ideological backdrop. The Olympic Charter states six ‘Fundamental Principles of Olympism’, which emphasize ‘universal fundamental ethical principles’ such as: “The harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity [...] The practice of sport is a human right [...], which requires a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play. Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.“7 These fundamental principles, which as an ideology are central to the Games, offer progressive modes of social interaction. They function as a pre-packaged unit to dictate how the games operate. Immersed in this ideological mindset athletes from all over the world participate and the host cities are mobilized to create a welcoming atmosphere and a lasting legacy benefiting the local communities while exposing themselves on the world’s stage.

The above paragraphs serve as a backdrop for understanding the current production of the Olympic Ma-

Olympic Tent Village,Vancouver 2010 © The Blackbird

chine. Obviously, its mode of operation, based on an alliance between neoliberal and governmental forces, calls for protest and resistance as was most recently the case at the XXI Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. This mega spectacle was set within a social democratic structure - as opposed to the summer Games in Beijing - and framed by the contemporary conditions of capitalism. This is where urban production shifts from manufacturing goods towards meta-production: the buying of pre-fabricated products, assembling these and creating new markets is strand of what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘control society’.8 Capitalism sells services and buys activities, which is exactly were the Olympic Games fits in - buying an activity and selling services.

In the following I will underline the social and economic asymmetries in the circuit of these contemporary neoliberal capitalist productions. In Vancouver the most controversial issues have been collected in the May 2009 online-clip ‘Eight Reasons to Oppose the 2010 Winter Olympics”9 by the ORN (Olympic Resistance Network), which read as follows: # 1. Colonialism and Fascism are still supported through the Olympic Industry. # 2. No Olympics on Stolen Land since a massive land grab takes place on Natives’ Land. # 3. Ecological Destruction. E.g. the clearing of 100.000 trees for a Highway extension to Whistler or the Ga-

mes’ generating 3.7 mio. tons of carbon emissions. # 4. Increase of Homelessness and Poverty. Since winning the bid, homelessness in the city of Vancouver has e.g. increased by 370 % and the criminalisation of the poor recalls social cleansing. # 5. Impact on Women. Such mega events boost sex trafficking and prostitution. # 6. Police State. Around 15.000 Police, Military and Security Personnel are employed as are 40 km of crowd control fencing, CCTV surveillance cameras and security zoning amounting to a security budget of over $ 900 mio. # 7. Public Debt. Originally the sum of $ 2 bn was quoted for hosting the spectacle. Yet, one year before the Games’ opening, the number had already tripled to $ 6bn of public debt. # 8. Corporate Invasion. Increasing corporate power over daily lives and concurrently record-breaking increases (!) in industries.

This unpleasant enumeration of outrageous facts is engendered by the production of the Olympic Machine.

This list shows the result of systemic channelling of power - enabled by a rational functioning mode - which penetrates and infiltrates the state-apparatus and concurrently maps the synthesis of sovereignty and capital.

This alliance embodied in the Olympic agency acts as a powerful tool overriding existing power structures and EF - 9

Military Helicopter seen from the Olympic Tent Village,Vancouver 2010 © The Blackbird

producing new bodies of agents; they concurrently become nodes, translating, transforming and multiplying themselves. A growing intensity of continuous fluxes, their transformations and the spatialization of power relations manufacture the socio-political and economic strands of an urban fabric. Such interrelated processes and their power structures, which govern the contemporary city, become particularly visible when implementing a mega spectacle such as the Olympic Games.

The reorganisation of urban life in a distinct area mobilizes coalition and alliance formations between public, political as well as private sectors—also in terms of resistance.

The above outlined eight points pinpoint the grass roots’ struggles for social justice on a micro level. Different modes of critical analyses with subsequent protests and acts of resistance call for social justice and solidarity aiming to change the Games’ mode of production: to produce different affects in alternative modes. In the forefront of the Games the torch relay was disrupted in more than 30 cities across Canada. The ORN Convergence kicked off with a two-day summit and hundreds of participants. Numerous demonstrations and radical actions took place; the most internationally noticed having been the “Heart Attack 2010” and “Take back our City” protests. “Take back our EF - 10

City” featured a heterogeneous group of activists such as Indigenous Groups, Anti-Poverty Activists, and Civil Liberties Advocates who welcomed the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. Unfortunately, the “Heart Attack 2010” protest on the following day made headlines because of smashed shop windows and not because of the protestors’ social concerns. Because of this very controversial incident and because of the urgency for a change of the modes of operation of the Olympic machine I quote Vancouver based Anti-Poverty activist Anna Hunter saying “We hope that people will continue to see this spectacle as another point of resistance in addition to the WTO and G8. The impact of the Olympics on host communities can bring together the local struggles for justice and the struggles for radical change against these larger institutions.”10 It is important to understand that the accomplished actions executed by different activist groups employed multiple methods and means targeting very specific social concerns. Transformations shaping the city in the process of building towards and hosting the Games enforce social division and exclusion through methods such as the increase of policing and surveillance or, on the territorial level, the (de) instalment of urban furniture, which cannot be put to any other than the intended use. These macro political interventions transform

the public sphere, which is central to public debates, to shape political subjects as well as to democratic struggles. The activist scheme “Olympic Tent Village in 58 West Hasting Street”, situated on the VANOC (Vancouver Organising Committee) parking lot drew attention to homelessness, human rights and the governmental attitude towards such concerns. This campaign ended successfully with more than 40 Tent Village residents receiving housing. The employed method was not the protest in the first place but “autogestion or self management” as Jeff Derksen calls it with reference to Henri Lefèbvre.11 ‘Colonizing’ the spectacle’s in-between space in a self-organised mode triggered the re-drawing of the homeless’ map of coexistence.

On this very small note, I finish my remarks.

1 Quoted from: Shaw, Christopher A. Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2008. p 1.

2 John J. MacAloon, This Great Symbol: Pierre De Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. 113-154. from the Chapter V ‚The Olympic Idea’ .

3 Foucault, Michel, Michel Senellart, François Ewald, and Alessandro Fontana. Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. p. 1.

4 Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry. Enlightenment as Mass Deception” Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 2008 : 120-167 : 121.

5 The close relationship of mass sports and fascist ideas operates on many different levels. More in E.g.: Andrew Jennings, and Clare Sambrook. The Great Olympic Swindle: When the World Wanted Its Games Back. London: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

6 Björn Surborg, Elvin Wyly, Rob VanWysberghe. Mapping the Olympic Growth Machine: World-City Networks and the Transnational Capitalist Class. http://iocc.ca/documents/MappingTheOlympicGrowthMachine. pdf [accessed 07/06/10].

This paper gives a critical in-depth sight on local and transnational synergies in Vancouver.

7 Fundamental Principles of Olympism. The Olympic Charter. In Force as from 7 July 2007, p 11 (online) http://multimedia.olympic.org/pdf/en_report_122.pdf [accessed 07/06/10].

8 See Gilles Deleuze. ”Postscript on Control Societies.“ Negotiations 1972-1990. Eruopean perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995: 177-182: 181.

9 No2010.com, Burning Fist Media, Resist 2010: Eight Reasons to Oppose the 2010 Winter Olympics, May 2009 http://vimeo.com/4872922 [accessed 07/06/10].

10 Anna Hunter, the daughter of the Olympian Jim Hunter, organises the Anti-Poverty Committee. ORN E-mail 27.02.2010.

11 Jeff Derksen, ”Art and Cities during Mega-Events, on the Intersection of Culture, Everyday Life, and the Olympics in Vancouver and Beyond. Part III“ in: Camera Austria No. 110/2010. P. 60.

Protest Signs from the Olympic Tent Village,Vancouver 2010 © The Blackbird

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Niki Weitzer Phantastic Pessimism 2010

Ole Hagen at The Horse Hospital, London 6-27 March 2010

Lisa Skuret

The Horse Hospital, an infirmary for Victorian London’s ailing equines - turned art space, became the atmospheric laboratory for Ole Hagen’s Holography for Beginners: an exhibition of perceptual ‘acrobatics’ made semi-lucid via directional beams of video projection and spotlights. Described in the press release as ‘a series of simple spatial experiments with material…embodied by the angles and structures of the Horse Hospital’, the room and the directional lighting not only had a curatorial role to play within the exhibition, but also worked to activate it. Let me explain. Hagen, using the twentieth-century terminology of physicist David Bohm describes the exhibition as setting up the conditions for actualising, or making visible, the appearance of the holomovement.

In his conception of the holomovement, Bolm used the analogy of the hologram to explain the appearance of objects in the world. He suggested that the world is comprised of imperceptible (to the human eye) energy within which no internal or external distinctions exist and, as in holographic technology, opacity is created by wave frequency interference. In other words, all material things arise from patterns of interference, or folds, temporarily highlighted in the mobility of a universal flux.

Everything is a fold in time and in Hagen’s exhibition the room acts as a type of holographic field, with a brain and perhaps a pair of 3D glasses, from which one can begin to perceive this movement.

The exhibition itself encompassed video, drawing, sculpture and a 3D cartoon publication visualising stories of absurdist violence by both Daniil Kharms and Henri Michaux.The video Orbit, 2010, and sculpture Nodehead, 2010, both featured cartoonlike heads lacking, or partially missing, facial features. Nodehead, a large, unplinthed bust with lunar-shaped head, apparently occupied a corner of the room concretely, but looking inward through its binocular eyes revealed a surprising elasticity. In a momentarily disorienting movement, interior/exterior distinctions contorted and one of us appeared to have moved, or perhaps, we/I, was/were one, or more than one. In an impossibly shared infinite regress-as-digress (facilitated by a holographic image of the sculpture projected from/into its interior), as I peered into the interior of Nodehead my frame of reference seemed to have expanded as I simultaneously saw Nodehead from, and felt myself to be in both, my original position, as well as at CC - 14

Ole Hagen, Holography for Beginners, The Horse Hospital, 2010 Featuring (left-right), Broken Beast, Omniassimilate Ectoexpression, and Nodehead, 2010

Production Still, Orbit, Ole Hagen, 2010

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a distant angle across the room. In the holomovement, as in the poetry of Henri Michaux, perhaps ‘ME is nothing but a position in equilibrium.’1 In a futile attempt to find a balancing point within a locally constructed cosmology, Hagen’s video projection, Orbit, featured a faceless figure balancing a monument-like head on an ill-fitting, fleshy torso-plinth while alternately fitting a range of impractical geometric objects (including one resembling a symbol of the alchemical star regulus) into the crater-like surface where a face would normally sit.

The ink and watercolour drawing Omniassimilate Ectoexpression, 2010, seemed to occupy a space somewhere between 60’s-70’s psychedelia and revelatory, religious print à la Dürer, via an Aristolian horror vacui. Aristotle’s concept of horror vacui (or plenism) proposed that nature, fearing empty space, was always drawing in matter all things are drawn to the gap. Similarly inspired by fear - of the blank page, empty space, the void or, ultimately, of death - Freud suggested that (obsessional) objects are created and the page is filled in a defensive reaction. In a similar way, it has been suggested that the function of organised religion is to fill gaps in knowledge as a defense against the void or, one could say that the process of filling-in functions to filter-out that which exceeds knowledge. Empty void or plenum? – comprehension depends on one’s frame. Others, including Bergson, have suggested that, rather than

Omniassimilate Ectoexpression, 2010 Courtesy: The Horse Hospital

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Production Still, Plenum, Ole Hagen, 2009

something to be naturally feared (and mediated by signifiers or representations), the gap, full of potential, allows access to a different type of knowledge. Working, here, with the holomovement, perhaps all things exist in time with an energetic movement, but some, relegated to the background by a movement of Freudian horror vacui, exist unseen in parallel to the currently foregrounded commonsense human perception. And it appears as if Omniassimilate Ectoexpression manifests as a fantastical vision of this struggle.

In other recent work, such as Plenum, 2009, included in the group show Multiverse, which he curated at the Danielle Arnaud Gallery in London, Hagen opens up William James’s concept of the multiverse to explore origins of creativity. With Multiverse, Hagen proposed that creativity (or, in this case, fiction) is not just a product of the individual genius mind, but already exists (as potential) and can be accessed (as a free download) from parallel virtual worlds in the multi-verse. Plenum, a video projection on continual loop, depicts a man in a disposable forensic/painters jumpsuit sitting in what ambiguously could be either an artist’s studio or airplane/ufo hangar.

A hose, connecting his mouth to a pile of unidentified reflective material, alternately inflates-deflates the heap into a larger-than-life, prototype human/alien/, or as Hagen has suggested, avatar. Working with the definition of avatar as (earthly, visible, or known) manifestation, with each manifestation the (apparent) void is self-(ful)filled, while at the same time, a close-up shot (of the holographically ‘reflective’ avatar in the inflation-deflation process) reveals an alien multitude: an assemblage of unidentifiables shape-shifting in time with the process of folding and unfolding.

Now, pausing for breath, what does all of this mean? Is Holography for Beginners suggesting that, as we are all folds in an energetic force, material (art) objects as we know them, are not merely static force-fields, but might in some way be alive and CC - 17

open to communication? Is Hagen knowingly taking us by the hand and leading us through a hall of illusions, escorting us through walls or, as in Broken Beast, 2010, columns? Does the creative faculty-factory specialise in the production of special effects? Or maybe Holography for Beginners acts like a guide composed through a type of holographic process: a shared thought-image arising from multiple perspective, but one which currently remains outside the realms of common-sense, and causal understanding. The effects produced might reveal some insights into current modes of interpretation. Perhaps, in order to avoid a response in the form of a Freudian horror vacui, one should ‘ask not what it might mean, but what it can do.’2 What the exhibition’s acrobatics did was to activate reflection on (potential) causes of inspiration for the constructions of man-made knowledge. Holography for Beginners was a series of ‘experiments’ designed not to replicate or prove, but to provoke questions on accepted truths; the world as one currently understands it via a series of filters – for example, the brain, memory, linear time, and science. By creatively experimenting with counterintuitive implications arising from scientific understandings, the exhibition not only raised questions on methods of knowledge-production, but also on the role that perceptual-historical-cultural framing has on the (creative) interpretation of results.

1 Michaux, Henri. Darkness Moves: an Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984, selected, translated and presented by David Ball, University of California Press, 1997, p.77 2 Holland, Eugene. Deleuze and Guattari‘s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis, Routledge, 1999, p.3

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Jacopo Miliani New York 1989 Paris is Burning, A tribute Courtesy of the artist TH - 19

56th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 29.4. - 04.5.2010 Each year the Ruhr town of Oberhausen hosts a festival called the Kurzfilmtage. To aficionados it almost has the reputation of being a family gathering.

On the Elsässer Strasse (where the main events take place), as with most family houses, regular guests have their own habits while new visitors sometimes get lost looking for the right room. Yet, it is by meeting everyone’s demands and keeping a sense of common identity that a formula can sustain itself.

Hence, this year’s edition featured the festival’s international competition, screenings by distributors and other organisations as diverse as sixpackfilm, Light Cone, LUX or Art Basel along with special profiles on Indian filmmaker Amit Dutta, the No Wave scene and more. Veronika Hauer and Adeena Mey chose to report on some of these. Perhaps unexpectedly, the following reviews focus on ‘From the Deep‘, an early 20th century film program, and on a conference cycle about “ideas of the self”. Yet, this surely accounts for the richness of film beyond its present moment and boundaries.

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Adeena Mey

The Idea of the Self Analogies, it is true, decide nothing but they can make one feel more at home.

Sigmund Freud What better place than a film festival to reflect upon oneself? From the process that starts with uncertain expectation and leans towards spectatorship to the mundane parallel experience of wandering through the streets of Oberhausen, the 56. Internationale Kurzfilmtage was definitely a theatre of stimuli and affects. If, expectedly, the form of spectatorship was that of a curved or twisted graph, gap moments could be used to reshape the contours of one’s self – be it a light-hearted, bored, excited or simply indifferent one – into that of the non-fragmented, mythical authentic self.

As my somehow hyperbolesque introductory words to the topic addressed within the series of talks The Idea of the Self already betray the relationship between what we refer to as the “self” and cinema does not let itself easily deciphered. Furthermore, as the German title of the event – Die Illusion des Ich – renders even more explicit, is there a reality of the self at all or is it simply, despite a certain disembodiedness of the notion, however overrated? These questions were both the framework and object of daily talks held at the “Podium”, the discussion facility facing the theatre. Moderated by Whitechapel gallery film-curator Ian White, festival participants could start their day with a range of different presentations engaging with the topic, mostly delivered by filmmakers and curators. Notwithstanding the prosaic aspect of these categories, it is to the French art critic Elisabeth Lebovici we owe one of the most insightful talks1. A feminist and specialist of women artists, Lebovici set out from Lacan’s take on the idea of the self to develop the potentiality of the notion when engaging with the art practices of artists such as Annette Messager, Louise Bourgeois or Claude Cahun. Lacan’s seminal “mirror-stage” reminds one of the optical dimensions in the process of the emergence of the self. Such is the nodal point between subjectivity and the visual arts: the possibility of fashioning oneself within heterogene-

Podium (01.05.2010), Cinemas of the Self?

Left to right: Beth B, Mariann Lewinsky and Emma Hedditch Photo: Kurzfilmtage / Daniel Gasenzer

ous, kaleidoscopic visual apparatuses in the making or to be made. For instance, for Messager, what was at stake in being an artist was not so much producing work, rather producing herself or her self. As for Bourgeois, inquiries into her private self ultimately led to an iconoclastic and liberatory gesture: the destruction of interiority, which is the Father as Lebovici’s psychoanalytically put it.

Another take on the relationship between the visual and the self was presented by Mariann Lewinsky, a Zurich-based curator and one half of the curatorial team of From the Deep: The Great Experiment 1898-1918 shown in Oberhausen. Introducing films shot in Switzerland in the early 20th Century whose endings all focused on public gatherings, Lewinsky brought up a very welcome reminder (as did the film program by presenting “silent” movies accompanied by musical performances): the kinds of “spectatorship” paralleling the emergence of different types of projected spectacles were protean.

As a matter of fact, in its early years of existence, cinema was not a phenomenon whose audience quietly sat in a dark projection room. Rather, cinema in broader – necessary – terms is more as Ian White wittily formulated “an archaeology in reverse” which enables us to think about “how we look at things now”. This question can be brought close to the “episteme 1900”, a term coined by film scholars Maria Tortajada and François Albera to describe the range of technologies and modalities of vision and projection developed at the turn of the 19th Century, which go beyond cinema to traverse spheres such as magic, psychological sciences and of course film (in all its diversity and unexplored

possibilities). Thus, while starting from cinema per se, what such an epistemology of the filmic apparatus teaches us also requires – to add to White’s comment – thinking about what we look at and about what has come to be historically constructed as cinema.

Lewinksy’s intervention was followed by a talk by New York filmmakers James Nares and Beth B, who was present on the occasion of the special profile on the No Wave “movement” (which actually refers to a more scattered aggregate of people than this etiquette says). If the pleasure of watching Coleen Fitzgibbon’s L.E.S, 1976, John Lurie’s Men in Orbit, 1979 or some of Vivienne Dick’s films definitely conveyed the sense of experimentation and the connections/overlappings with the No Wave music scene as well as its rebellious and DIY ethos, Nares and Beth B.’s presentation somehow fell into the anecdotal. Were it not for the truth-factor of the experiences they narrated, the bombastic yet naïve emphasis on “breaking boundaries” or “becoming empowered” only turned the subversiveness these positions had in the 1970’s into a vacuous logorrhoea. But perhaps, this was only an effect of a very honourable intention and the sign of its difficulty: gathering multiple stories, positions and practices under the umbrella of the self. Indeed, if the series of talks tried to explore and sketch the possibility of what a “cinema of the self” might be or “the politicisation of life as film”, the way film practices intersect with a discursive modality such as discussions made the latter a great unfolding of analogies between cinema and ideas of the self that were at times wobbly. Yet, it is probably also here where the CC - 25

beauty and challenge of such events lies: trying to exhaust the potential of language to the point that it is repressed by poetics.

Veronika Hauer

The Self - stepping beside itself She waits for him outside the baggage claim, adjusting her upper body and legs to the wide-open arms of a larger-than-life McDonald’s clown on one of the benches opposite the metal slide doors. Before his actual arrival on site she leaves the mechanical embrace of the clown and sneaks around the hall, knowing she only got one chance out of three he will be walking through the very door she picks to stage their reunion. Holding her pose - right knee bended, arms above her head, the face pulling a face – she acknowledges that one out of three wont lead her anywhere. And truly, as foreseen, he arrives through the door that escapes her vantage point and tips her on the shoulder - surprised by the deranged face she pulls at a metal slide door in unbroken concentration.

From the Deep: The Great Experiment 1898-1918 For this year’s international short film festival in Oberhausen Zurich-based curator Mariann Lewinsky and experimental filmmaker and writer Eric de Kuyper curated the program From the Deep: The Great Experiment 1898-1918 featuring a selection of about hundred European short films of “the cinema of the early years“. Donald Sosin’s live piano performance added a peculiarly vivid atmosphere to the ten screenings supporting the mutual act of watching by his play’s precise tuning to each film’s narrative and dramaturgy. The curator’s emphasis on reading the presented cinematographic productions, not as autonomous pieces but within the context of their presentation at the time, being single parts of longer programmes2, was consistently appropriated in their programming of ten thematic sub-programs of 8-14 films each. Despite the apCC - 26

Bout-de-Zan s‘amuse (Bout-de Zan Is Enjoying Himself) France 1913 Photo: EYE Film Instituut Nederland

preciation of Lewinsky’s and de Kuyper’s attempt to adapt the contemporary presentation of these films to their Zeitgeist, modes of production and the context of the “overall programme of the cinema presentation“3 of their time, many of the short films surely achieved to sustain the state of autonomous pieces within the eye of their contemporary beholder. Amongst the many remarkable aspects of the short films presented in From the Deep, most intriguing appeared the overtly curiosity of filmmakers and performers to explore the new medium in witty choreography, explicit and precise observations of motion and movement of the body, often rewriting ‘natural’ movement into a slapstick-like dramaturgy.

The most beautiful smile I have ever seen4 Time and again a self-conscious smile escapes the protagonists acting out for the camera, acknowledging that their yet rather personal actions on site will subsequently be distributed to an even wider audience in the cinema. Here, the ignorance of the amateur, if his/her movement should either differ or imitate the habitual or the theatrical, collides with the awareness of motion’s importance as the maybe most affective tool to create suspense and entertainment within silent film. Such collision induced partly fascinating performances, succeeding in simplicity and directness to fraternise performer and spectator on an unexpected level of immedia-

Beim Fotografen (At the Photographer‘s) Austria 1907 Photo: Filmarchiv Austria

te identification. Akin to some early video performance pieces many of the short films feature only one performer engaged in a simple physical exercise or task. Whilst this staging of small sketches for the camera owes much to theatre and acting, performers visibly try to extend the limitations of the medium, constrained by the absence of sound and language. Hence to see but not to hear performers speak (either into the camera or to invisible bystanders) creates a feel for these films’ existence not solely as staging for the camera, but as autonomous events of their time. This feel of the live performance bundled with the desire to explore (performance) methods customized to film, provides many of the works with a mediated presence, further enhanced by its fragmentation and disruption. A presence that is more a presentness maybe, or the liveliness of the uncontrollable and odd (of side glances and smiles toward the camera and the invisible onlooker.)

Dance, motion, bodily movement5 turning mechanical and plain choreography extending to excessive dimensions, were just some of the motives explored in the first sub-program of From the Deep, entitled Sensation of Motion, Dimension of Time, Presence of Absence.

Danse serpentines (Serpentine Dances), France/ USA 1896-1898 for one, features two performers6, one by one swinging a thin opaque fabric mounted onto two sticks, moulding a ghostlike simulacrum

to their own bodies wrapped in fabric of the same kind. Utilising mechanical effects, the choreography transforms the flat into voluminous forms, capturing a haptic sensation for motion’s immaterial traces.

Acceleration of speed and rhythm may characterise modernity and the cinematic in as much as it characterises the silent slapstick body7. In Kri Kri e il tango (Kri Kri Learns the Tango), Italy 1913 dance choreography turns into a mechanical oversteer creating slapstick chaos. Comedians Kri Kri and Lea are swathed in a rope by a competitor whilst dancing the tango at a mundane dance party. Set free from the rope they spin like a whirligig around the house, their accelerated circular motion excessively exceeding the natural duration of the initiating mechanical rope effect. Just as any successful slapstick performance pursues the acceleration of speed and rhythm to overcome the body’s natural physical capabilities with a mechanical temporality, their runway through the house violently destructs any given order of objects and subjects alike. The film ends with the pairs leap from the balcony into the water - water being the only element to stem their infinite entanglement in motion. The jump is immediately played backwards, returning the couples leap into the water back onto the balcony.

Akin to Kri Kri e il tango, Le Pendu (The Attempted Suicide), France 1906 also adapts the automatism of an initiated bodily movement turning mechanical, although in a dramaturgic entirely different way.

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Dismissed by his lover’s parents the protagonist’s attempted suicide in the woods is soon discovered by two walkers who surprisingly do not end his suffering immediately on site but decide to submit the affair to a higher authority. Therefore whilst the suicide fights death commuting back and forth on his string, his ‘helpers’ hurry to fetch the local policeman and take him to ‘the scene of crime.’ This back and forth movement or commuting of the crowd is re-enacted several times, as is the suicide’s commuting, propelled by the rowing of his feet in the air.

He as much as the crowd seem pushed by speed and time, a temporality predefined by the velocity of death taking over the living. Just in the very final moments of life - as the man threatens to suffocate - they end their seesaw and cut him down from the tree. The scene ceases with the imminent stillness introduced by the oncoming end of liveliness. For Le Pendu, the rowing of the hanged, flouncing and twitching, affects the dash of occurrences: an incident which the audience cannot dismiss before the last instant of its endurance has arrived.

Early 19th Century dancer Loie Fuller.

Source: http://brklyngirl.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/picture-61.png?w=494&h=336

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1 French speakers might have a look at her blog http://le-beauvice.blogspot.com, whose title obviously bears a lacanian influence.

2 Mariann Lewinsky: “As a whole, this production is anonymous, serial, without stars, without masterpieces. No short film of these years contains its own entire meaning, for an important part of this meaning was inherent in the function that film took in the overall programme of the cinema presentation. Every film of these years was conceived as part of a programme of some twelve so-called scenes or pictures and not as an autonomous film. A cinematographic scene has a genre-specific tonality; it is not complex. The complexity of this cinematography only becomes perceptible within the combination of genres in a cinema presentation. The inherent incompleteness of the single scenes and their being confused with films as we know them today may be one reason why early cinematography is generally underestimated or even misunderstood.“ 56th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Festival Catalogue, p. 86.

3 Ibid.

4 This title refers to part of Rabih Mroué’s performance lecture at the Kunsthalle Project Space on June 19th 2010, as part of the Wiener Festwochen. Although Rabih Mroué’s use of the same title referred to a woman’s smile that was similarly transmitted to him by technical device, recorded in another time and distant place, the effects both smiles might have had on each of us, I suppose must have been comparably strong.

5 Lewinsky and de Kuyper in their introduction to program 1: Sensation of Motion, Dimension of Time, Presence of Absence: “Films from the first decade of the 20th century demonstrate with impressive clarity what cinematography is about: the sensation of motion, the dimension of time and the presence of absence.“ 56th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Festival Catalogue, p. 88.

6 Ibid. Additional information about the film from the catalogue: “Two imitators of Loie Fuller, who caused a sensation from 1892 in Paris with her performance involving colour-light projections on moving cloth.“ 7 See: Jayamanne, L. (2001) “A Slapstick Time: Mimetic Convulsion, Convulsive Knowing” in Toward Cinema and Its Double, Jayamanne L., Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Florian Zeyfang Horizons (Tableau) 2010 With Erik Stein. An archival index on Florian Zeyfang‘s “Horizons“, digital video 30 min. and installation, 2009.

The video/installation Horizons is composed of 10 chapters, where a camera pans in still images vertically over a painting by C.V. Lundberg, depicting a Swedish harbour in 1892. Each chapter closes with black and white photographs, alternating between images from the Västerbotten Fotoarchiv (Umeå) showing lake views and ship cruises, and found footage from all over the world of merchant ships and people on migration routes. In the original installation, the painting itself is placed in close relation to the projection. Florian Zeyfang works with Erik Stein on a web-based version of this video that translates the “slowness“ of the original piece for the internet and will be launched shortly: www.florianzeyfang.de

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Helmut Heiss, Burning House, 2010

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product would it sell?

In fact, the invisible (gas) gets visualised as a rough drawn caricature in itself, and could also function as Robert Müller a hidden joke for physicians (whenever using Helium always having the Hindenburg in mind- burning because Some short and loosely connected notions on the of the non-use of it). A plastic drawing, a self-referential ‘foggy architecture’ of Helmut Heiss and his collabora- sign that contains the same, but different, physical notitors in (b/w) slides. on as its represented content.

An irritation, sculpture (non-)parlante; what you see and expect is not what you would and could see. The idea of a designed atmosphere creeps out exactly like the ‘bulbs’ do. The uncanny image of burning a building, I On Smoke represented through the image of black smoke is liteSlide I rally ‘breathtaking’. “Terrorism, product design and the “A (very short) history of American graphic humour“ idea of environment”3; Peter Sloterdijk peeps out of a street cruiser’s rear window.

A house, maybe L.A. Palm trees surround the picturesque scene in the background of the setting. The spot: Slide II (and a ½) ‘classical modernist’ white.What’s left is a photo, maybe “Drawing restraint“ - “Space,Time, Architecture“ two. What can be seen: basically an ‘inflatable’, a sculpture-like, self-tailored figure, a balloon. Burning House, Smoking, 2008. A two-part series. Smoke(ing) again.

2010 appears as an abstract shadow of what could be a Helmut smokes, cold Weather, maybe early spring, or colourful, rasterised pop-sign. Size: gigantic, overdosed, late autumn, a wooden background, forest. Two photos with architectural dimensions. A sign, evoking black made by Cäcilia Brown, who collaborated with Helsmoke, like a comic or cartoon drawing, a decoration mut Heiss in the next slide to be spoken about. Dark to the ‘shed’ by Rudolph M. Schindler, the Austrian ar- shadows emerge on the left side of the first picture, chitect who built the ‘white cubes’ where now a black revealing itself on the next one as a steam train, driving balloon creeps out towards the blue L.A. sky. on the unseen, half hidden tracks behind the grass in The variety of aspects astonishes; a sign pops out of the the forefront. The photo merges the two spheres, man shed that in itself will be buried by the massive, expan- and man-made machine into one image, a ‘trompe de ding shape of the inflated form. Buried under the mass l’oeil’ folly, proclaiming visually on the first gaze, the of something, more or less without mass, the ‘shaped’ performer would blow out as much smoke as a steam helium covers the inside of the building and fills the train.What appears as a visual and simple joke, is in fact sculpture’s inside likewise, as well as it transforms the not only a notion on montage and the constitution of a outer lineature of the buildings structure.The question, ‘vedute’ (the baroque tool that represents the control whether it transforms the Mackey Apartments into a of sight through [landscape] architecture) through the “decorated shed”1 or if the blow-up is in itself a de- photographic lens. It never plays tricks on the eye, or functionalised, somehow ridiculous dark quote on the tries to play tricks on the viewer. It is a tribute to the “Long Island Duckling” that Venturi, Scott-Brown and possibility of creating something ‘just in time’, a moIzenour set up as an icon of the Las Vegas outskirts ment that becomes a special condition - two merging, seems to be immediately at hand2, not only because blown out materials, steam and smoke collide - in the it is explicitly raised by the artist. But the question representational space of an image, as well as on the remains more or less unanswered. Neither duck nor wooded ‘set’. A blurry, more poetic than easy collage decorated shed, the duckling rather offers pork rinds set on stage in two media spheres: smoke and phothan duck meals. No house is burning, no fire trucks or tography. Both are somehow performers, the smoking even fireworks to be seen. But, nevertheless not a sim- protagonist and its metallic companion rushing by (like ple visual joke. The ‘smoky’ shape in fact does not even the huge truck in Stephen Spielberg’s motion picture contain smoke. The stylised outline evokes the idea of Duel the steam train seems to be set alive by not knoa burning house as a spatial graphic; as a large scale wing/seeing a conductor); both ‘caught in the act’ of advertisement for burning down houses, what kind of smoking in a strange man-machine-simultaneity.

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II Architectural Intermission Slide III La fonction oblique Showing the coastline of Turkey, a beach in a lonely bay can be gathered in the photograph Column, 2009. This materialisation of Helmut Heiss’ and Cäcilia Brown’s collaboration, a (four-hand mounted) piece of roughly assembled silver air mattresses, drifts in the shore.

Slightly twisted and lurching with a certain angle, the vaguely column-like object tends to embrace the open sea, but remains slightly fixed by a huge rock, guaranteeing the upright position of the inflated structure.

Anchored at the beach near a town called Olympos - a fitting name by chance or purpose- its silver-coated, reflecting surface immediately reminds one of the antiquities possibly covered by or hidden at the site. From a distance the column-like object has an appearance of a strange ‘fata morgana’.

Blurry, glooming artificiality, that appears like a last and lost reminder on the antique history; today’s Turkish coastline (which in fact is not the ancient coast, that was far behind the nowadays existing coastline, as the Mediterranean Sea dried out during the last few centuries), with its mighty states like Troy or the city of Pergamon once belonged to the ancient Hellenic world.

At second view, the association gets more and more vague, as the object itself ‘objects’. Its obvious weakness and precarious outline has not even the strengths to remain in its place, no waves are broken on its powerless surface. It is linked not so much to the ancient appearances of its formal ancestors, but merely reminds one strongly of the contemporary use of columns for decoration: the everyday ‘downtown’ version of a flattened and formalised history, drifting in the shore of the Mediterranean tide. As a simulation of a vague future’s own antique, it reminds (downscaled and without any pathetic Hollywood notions) one of the discovery of the Statue of Liberty’s lying head in Frank Shaffer’s Planet of the Apes; a simulation of an a-historic moment, in which the contemporary simulates its own ruins. As a kind of sculpture-version of Sir John Soane’s painting of his own design for the Bank of England, painted as a ruin, the contrasting very rough and quick sketch of Brown and Heiss evokes a short, melancholic moment, addressing the appeal and decay of every-day-aesthetics in a more sympathetic than cynical way.

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Cäcilia Brown and Helmut Heiss, Column, 2009

Slide IV L’architettura della città A neon-lit tent, built of steel and blue and white striped waterproof fabric. Surviving a snowy night outdoors at a central square in Salzburg, right in front of the entrance of the gallery. A garden or summer tent in a cold winter night, type ‘Gazebo’- but self-made, co-

pied, customised, and fitted to the outlines and spatial conditions of the inside conditions of the gallery space.

‘Raumanzug’ is literally a fitting ‘spacesuit’.

It is staged in two different environmental conditions, inside and outside the gallery space that it was customised for, both bearing different connotations.

Instead of focusing on the institutional (usually somehow formalised as ‘critical’) aspects, such as putting the ‘white’ gallery space in the outer world (in fact it is by purpose of course not a white tent), and stressing the often mantra-like proclaimed emphasis on merging the lines of the parallelised spheres of ‘art’ and ‘life’, the point seems more to shift to graphical and sculptural/architectural aspects. In its typological interest, the idea of a tent that swings between Laugier’s ‘Primorial’ and Semper’s ‘Caribbean’ hut, an aspect that could be seen only throughout one freezing night, it seems to be more or less art transformed into “frozen music” (Schopenhauer on architecture) in the ‘frozen’ moment of a photography4.

The tent as a condition in itself (if that exists anyway), does not only translocate and therefore visualize the measures of the gallery space (a visualization of the empty space by filling it is exemplified in Bruce Nauman’s concrete work A Cast of the Space under My Chair, 1965-68), it is in itself a somehow closed entity, and nevertheless ‘simply’ a room.

Within the gallery, the tent functions as drapery, an interior design-like tool, that transforms the ‘white cube’ into an expected outdoor space; it becomes a catalyst between different states of inner and outer sphere, but never creates a complete, immersive illusion, and remains more like a drawing, a sketch of an idea. By

chance or purpose, the Salzburg ‘tent room’ reminds directly on one of his famous ancestors, the ‘tent room’ designed by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who transformed the Prussian manor of Charlottenhof at Sanssouci into a castle in 1825, as well as changed a castles sleeping room interior to that of a tent. The romantic idea of intermingling nature and architecture that contains more the idea of a visual inclusion of the sleeper (dreamer) in an anyhow invented, natural outer space (by negotiating the castle’s walls), the simulation of a ‘golden age state’ becomes an exclusive idea and operation in Heiss’ setting. It creates an allusion of ‘stepping outside’ a gallery space especially and with perfidy by entering it. An allusion in which even the artist can get trapped5. The proclaimed change of the space is not so much an idea of factual translocation but fictive, visual de-territoralisation and more or less an operation of the mind. In fact, it gets clear that the idea of an aesthetic and visual transformation of a space contains the idea of a thought translocation of the audience. Like the rough-sketched, plastic smoke clouds of Burning House, the tent is lacking every immersive impetus, tricks and treats. They only unfold immersion among the conditions of “A willing suspension of disbelief”6.

III Misty Again Slide V Collage City Finally, smoking revisited, focussing on the presence of the performative act of ‘demolishing’ as burning litter

Helmut Heiss, Raumanzug, 2009 AS - 37

and trash by purpose. A row of images illustrates the time-based strand of action. Smoking II, 2009. A littered and dirty hole between two buildings, a street in an unknown city area, proclaimed to be Sinop; more or less unnamed. A smoking trash can, Helmut also smoking, but not simultaneously. Heiss sets the trash on fire; trash (cigarette) ‘enlightens’ trash. Like a constant declination of the different appearances of smoking, the notion differs in each work, from a spectre of a physical act getting visually parallelised by media, to the shift from a physical appearance to a three-dimensional image of it. What on the first view looks like the simple, spatially shifting illustration of a common obsession, drifts through various aspects of meaning and context throughout the close-ups on each of the singular works, and gets an additional notion within Smoking II. Smoking two; too? Again, object and performer combined in the act of a seemingly similar procedure, ‘acting out’ the same blow out of smoke in the air of Istanbul, but what appeared as an aesthetical ludic experiment in Smoking is becoming a context based act of affirmation and a re-enacted procedure of a (micro)economic ritual at this corner of the area. The specific dumpster is continuously and secretly set on fire by the neighbourhoods inhabitants and it remains unclear, whether it is a reaction to a service that does not take place or if it is done just in case of saving the money for getting it emptied. A (undefined) site-specific and social condition is transformed in an act of art-related, art-ificial vandalism. The question, whether the motivation (possibly a problem being solved in the solution of burning it down instead of waiting for the litter service, possibly poverty, maybe greed) shifts to something else in the context of re-enaction, remains vague and is not easy to answer; the action itself shifts between fraternisation and exemplification, as well as it stresses a thin line.

Caught between the aesthetic ‘bogus’, by vaguely imitating a phenomenon (like in Burning House), solely pointing on the fact of trash being burnt constantly, and the reality of the factual, the performer really takes part by visualising the everyday act of burning trash. Whereas the interest in the creation of objects often lies in their imagery and the irritating appearance of themselves (Heiss’ diploma title A bottle of urine that sparkles like gold in the ray of light…, 2008 might be symptomatic for that strategy), the performances are mostly driven by a specific kind of factual interventionist impulse.

Like in Mise en Scène, 2008, where the lighting system of the exhibition space was almost imperceptibly manipulated by Heiss in order to subliminally brighten and AS - 38

intensify the view of several works in comparison to others, the subversive ‘ironic’ connotations are often factual; pointing on something means here in fact: acting it out, letting it happen (again).

Postscript: I guess, Heiss as well as the train factually continue to smoke separately.

Helmut Heiss, Smoking II, 2009

Helmut Heiss, Smoking, 2008

1 Ventury, Scott-Brown, Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas. MIT Press, 1978 2 Ibid.

3 Peter Sloterdijk, Luftbeben. An den Quellen des Terrors. Suhrkamp, 2002 English Translation: Terror from the Air. Semiotexte, 2009 4 In his unpublished notes on the work, Heiss writes: “Für das Plakat zur Ausstellung habe ich ein ‘Gazebo’- Festzelt in Größe und Konfiguration des Galerieraumes nachgebaut und für eine Nacht auf dem Universitätsplatz in Salzburg im öffentlichen Raum aufgestellt.“ Translation: “For the poster, I rebuilt a ‘Gazebo’ Party-Tent according to its measures and configuration, and for one night placed it in public space at the Universitätsplatz in Salzburg.”

5 Ibid.: “Die BesucherInnen können in der Galerie den eigentlichen Ausstellungsraum nicht betreten, sondern nur den “Zeltraum.“ The visitors couldn’t enter the real Exhibitionspace, they only had access to the ‚Tent-Space 6 A willing Suspension of Disbelief is the title of an intervention of Heiss, that took place at Hinterconti, Hamburg in 2009

Stolen subtitles: 1Murrel, A History of American Graphic Humour (1865-1938). Macmillan Company, 1938 2 Barney, Obrist, Drawing Restraint Vol.1, Walter König, Cologne, 2006 3 Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time, Architecture, Cambridge, 1st published 1941 4 Rowe, Koetter, Collage City, MITPress, 1984 5 Rossi, L’architettura della città, Padua, 1978 6 The Function of the Oblique: The Architecture of Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, AApublications, 2004

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“Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present“. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010 (Installation view) Source: http://fine-art-news.mattters.com/2010/3/31/ao-on-site--new-york-marina-abramovithe-artist-is-present

The Artist Is Present (and Gives an Audience)

On Marina Abramovic’s Attempt to Musealize Performance Art At this very moment performance history is being (re-)written – at least that is what the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Marina Abramovic* proclaim with regard to the artist’s retrospective, which is currently on display at the museum.1 The curator of the show, Klaus Biesenbach and the artist thereby refer to the writing of history in two different ways: The show is advertised as the first major retrospective dedicated to a performance artist as well as the first attempt by one of the most important contemporary art museums to musealize the ephemeral art form of performance art. The show is not solely dedicated to the mission to find the ideal way of displaying performance art-history. In the course of the retrospective a new chapter of performance history is supposed to be written – Marina Abramovic will establish an endurance record in performance art by sitting motionless and silently for over 700 hours during her performance The Artist is Present.2 In a variation of her performance project Nightsea Crossing, 1981–87 (together with Ulay), Abramovic will sit in the atrium at a table every day of the exhibition, starting before the museum opens until after it closes. Opposite her, there is a free seat that any visitor can take to sit with her as long as he or she wishes to do so. As for the retrospective-part of the exhibiCC - 41

tion, curator and artist decided to rely not solely on documentation (photographs, videos, objects etc.) but to integrate so-called re-performances. A team of young performers was specially cast and trained

by Abramovic to re-perform five of her performances with her performance-partner Ulay (with whom she performed from 1976–1988) during the whole course of the exhibition. In preparation for the exhibition, the re-performers had to attend a workshop

by Abramovic called Cleaning the House that focused on a cleansing ritual for the “inside”, meditative exercises, endurance exercises, fasting, being naked in front of each other etc.3 In the following I will focus on Abramovic’s attempt to preserve performance art and her approach towards the writing of performance art’s history. The academic discipline of writing history is based on

different methods; one of them being the critical approach towards sources and the indication of ones sources. (Regarding to this methodological premise, I have to state in advance that I have not personally attended Abramovic’s retrospective) I can only rely on interviews, the exhibition catalogue, press articles as well as the report of a friend who attended the show and who sat with the artist. However, observing a performance and an exhibition on performance art from the distance has never been as easy as it is nowadays in the time of internet and live streams. MoMA created a special web-site where one could watch the live stream of Abramovic sitting and holding audience.4 The site offers a gallery of portraits of museum-goers sitting with the artist and several video-interviews with Abramovic herself.

“Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present“. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010 (Installation view) Source: http://www.flickriver.com/photos/jhcarter3/4444597080/

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Abramovic dedicated her artistic practice in the last couple of years (at least since the preparation for Seven Easy Pieces, 2005 to finding ways of preserving performance art. As she recalls on the Audio-CD accompanying the exhibition-catalogue The Artist Is Present, she got interested in protecting her legacy and the legacy of other performance artists from the 1970ies as she found their art used by many people without permission.5 Thus she initiated Seven Easy Pieces in the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2005, where she re-enacted legendary performances of other artists and herself – an event that drew much attention in the art world and was both praised and condemned.6 Recently, Abramovic established the “Institute for Preservation of Performance Art“ in an old church in Hudson, N.Y.7

My critique of Abramovic’s attempt to preserve performances through re-enactment (or re-performance as she calls it) is twofold: Firstly, I find it problematic that Abramovic considers reperformances to be the sole permissible method of preserving performance art in museums and therefore wants to set up a normative concept of how re-enactments have to be produced and staged (a concept that brings the performances closer to acting – a connection that Abramovic always wanted to avoid, following her motto “no rehearsal, no repetition, no predicted end”).8 Secondly, I do not agree with Abramovic’s notion that re-enactments can make a performance re-experiencable. Nevertheless re-enactments can help to reflect the processes of writing history, of remembering, of reflecting what has changed, what has been lost and what can be preserved.

Regarding re-enactments one can differentiate between a method I have come to call the reflecting method of reconstruction and a copying method of re-enacting like Abramovic’s.9 The artists working with the reflecting method are aware of the fact that they can never reproduce the “aura” of the “original” performance and are actually not interested in recreating the “original” experience, but rather make the gap between the re-enactment and the “original” visible and a subject of the reconstruction. This method reflects the problematic aspects of reconstructing, the material and documentation it can be based on as well as the difference of the context of production. As the Slovenian artist Janez Janša, whose reconstructions in my opinion are represen-

ting the reflective method, has stressed in public discussions of his project Pupilija, Papa Pupilo and the Pupilceks – Reconstruction, 2006, he favors the term reconstruction to reenactment since it relates to the fact that history as such is always something constructed.10 In contrast to the term reenactment that refers to performing, the term reconstruction acknowledges that certain aspects of the “original” can be reproduced, re-performed while others cannot. Janša stresses that the performance of a reconstruction is always approached with a different motivation than the “original” performance. Another important aspect that can never be reconstructed is the “original” audience. Since artists who employ the reflecting method are aware of the fact that they can only fail in re-producing the “original”, they open up the discussion of citation and different meanings in different times and contexts, instead of trying to copy the “original” as faithfully as possible.

Thus they reflect upon the process of historicization and make the construction of history visible.

As Peggy Phelan famously wrote in her book “Unmarked”: “Performance’s being […] becomes itself through disappearance”11. Precisely because of the ephemerality of performance art, reconstructions have the potential to make visible how remembering works, how history is written, how it is an act of construction. The act of reconstructing a performance is the act of (re)writing (a) history. It means putting together bits and pieces of memory, of remaining documents – an interweaving of material memory and immaterial memory. Reconstructions/ re-performances transform “historical” performances from an event lying in the past into something that becomes relevant for the present. But for the re-performance – to employ the term Abramovic uses – to develop a potential for today’s audience and evoke and provoke discussion, it is necessary that the re-performance not be restricted to one permissible and unchangeable form predetermined by a tight score. The creator of the re-performance – who could either be the creator of the “original” or somebody else – should be able to alter the performance and be able to reflect on the appearance of the re-performance in a different context and historical setting. Reconstructions/re-performances should be approached with a “conceptual access”.

For the dance scholar Claudia Jeschke who has published extensively on re-enactments and reconstructions, the “conceptual access means that the CC - 43

attitude toward the material has to be displayed knowingly and critically and made transparent”12.

Abramovic approach towards the preservation of performance art lacks such conceptual access – the only process of re-performance made partly visible is the workshop with the re-performers. In addition, the Abramovic’s memory seems to be the only source these re-performances are based on – at least contemporary witnesses are not visibly included in the exhibition.

For her Seven Easy Pieces Abramovic stated that performances could be re-enacted just like musical scores. Thus those who could not have attended the “original” ones could experience performances.13 Abramovic’s notion in my view lacks reflection on the fact that every performance-recreation is, even when produced as close to the “original” as possible, a different event, at a different historical moment and often in a different cultural, geographical etc. context with a different audience. The audience of a performance changes through time, just as much as the historical, cultural and geographical context does. Thus, when Abramovic’s and Ulay’s Imponderabilia (created in 1977 at a gallery in Bologna,Italy) is re-performed in 2010 by different pairs of performers in changing pairing of genders at the MoMA, not only is the audience another one but so is the public perception of the performance. Take for example the nudity of the performers – the “original” cast was stopped by the Italian police because of their “provoking” actions that consisted of standing still but naked in a gallery. Today the press discusses in relation to the re-performance of Imponderabilia the question whether the performers were sexually

Imponderabilia, 2010 Photo: Scott Rudd CC - 44

harassed by passing audience members or not. The change of historical context, norms and notions of what is “provoking” or not should be reflected upon in the attempt to write and musealize the history of performance art. However, in my opinion Abramovic’s attempts to find ideal ways of preserving performance art lack such reflection on changing circumstances and contexts effecting (and affecting) an audience.

Now, while in Seven Easy Pieces Abramovic acted with the intention to make seminal performances reexperiencable again for a contemporary audience, in “The Artist is Present“ the re-performances seem to be more orientated towards redoing the score underlying the performance. The re-performances are on display just like any other object in a museum: either elevated on a platform like a sculpture or specially lit. The re-performers seem like stand-ins, like tableaux vivants or mannequins, as my friend who was at the show described it. The question arises what Abramovic actually wants to re-perform – solely the score or the performance as a shared experience with the audience and the artists together in a given time and space, with a particular cultural and historical context? I do not want to idealize the “original” performances and claim that the re-performances, in the way Abramovic sets them up, lack the aura of the “original” ones (if there ever is such a thing as the “aura”, it is surely not reproducible as we know since Walter Benjamin). I partly agree with art critic Holland Cotter of the New York Times who summarized the re-performances as follows: “Two elements that originally defined performance art as a medium, unpredictability and ephemerality,

Source: http://www.checkoutart.ca/global-art/marina-abramovic-performs-at-the-moma/

Left: Marina Abramovic and Ulay at the opening of “The Artist is Present“ at MoMA on March 9, 2010. Photo: Scott Rudd Right: Marina Abramovic and unknown performance partner.

Sources: http://www.flickr.com/photos/themuseumofmodernart/4422559925/ & http://againsthegrainblog.com/?p=2698

were missing. Without them you get misrepresented history and bad theater.“14 I do not agree that the aspect of ephemerality of performances makes it impossible or in any way illegitimate to re-enact/ re-construct/re-perform them. But I believe that the re-performances as staged in the MoMA differ significantly from the notion of performance art that Abramovic has championed so far – a notion that stresses the same aspects that for example German theatre studies-scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte claims to be defining for performances. Fischer-Lichte defines performance as an event of shared experience between the performers and the spectators – an event that integrates unpredictability and often even the audience’s reaction in form of participation or physical interference.15 I do not generally agree with Fischer-Lichte on all counts and criticize FischerLichte’s notion of performance as a liminal experience that of necessity always transforms both the performer and the spectator. But I doubt that any of the re-performances of the MoMA-exhibition (with the exception of Imponderabilia) come close to an event that “opened up the possibility for the spectators to become completely involved in the performance, i.e. to react with strong physiological, affective, energetic, and motor transformations, and, at the same time, to reflect on the performance as well as on the effects it triggered”, as Fischer-Lichte wrote about Abramovic’s re-enactments for Seven Easy Pieces.16 The re-performances of “The Artist is Present“ are carefully planned, rehearsed and acted out continuously (certainly resulting in set routine after some weeks).

By criticizing Abramovic’s notion of re-performance

I do not want to claim that performances should always be singular events and are never to be reenacted/reconstructed etc. (as I wrote previously in this text, I see a lot of potential in reconstructions that reflect upon what, when, where and why they are actually reconstructing). I just want to point to a certain inconsistency in Abramovic’s attempt toward performance art: On the one hand she describes performance art as something that knows no repetition, is “real” (in contrast to acting) and is about temporality17, and on the other hand she produces re-performances that lack any of the latter aspects.

Abramovic repeatedly claims that performance art is a way for her as an artist to “elevate the spirit of the audience” and exchange energy with the audience.18 Have the re-performances created anything close to an energy-flow with the audience? Is a museumdisplay-situation – a safe environment, where unpredictability can be stopped in just a moment – a setting that allows for the energetic atmosphere that seems to be of importance for Abramovic? Certainly her sitting-performance in the atrium triggered a lot of energy and emotions as the portraits of the museums-goers in tears sitting with the artist show.19 Mostly because of this performance, the exhibition gained a lot of media attention – from reviews and comments in all major newspapers and art magazines to blog-entries, anecdotes, conjectures (like the question of how Abramovic pees during her sitting still for hours)20 and gossip about how celebrities were treated with special attention by Abramovic and her assistant so that they did not have to wait in line to sit with her.21 Holland Cotter wrote that “the whole business is another act of self-enshrine CC - 45

ment in the art world’s ego Olympics, and that’s not interesting”.22 Even if the whole event communicates more than just a suggestion of narcissism – and which retrospective or performance doesn’t? –, at least it is remarkable that it is not the narcissism of yet another “male” genius or not “another roundup of the usual male post-minimalist snooze fest”, as Jerry Saltz wrote in the New York Magazine.23 Saltz, though critical toward the concept of the show as a whole, stressed in another article the engagement of the audience in the performance “in ways that are as intense and profound as their interactions with paintings and sculpture”. The audience in his opinion “is more open and more mature than ever”.24 Has performance art finally arrived as an equal art form in the realms of canonical art history and art criticism? If that is what Marina Abramovic achieved through her audience at the MoMA, she might have actually contributed to the history of performance art, just as she intended to do – not only through her performances but also through her retrospective itself. And yet, as a critical historian, I cannot help doubting heroes and heroines alike…

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* We would like to acknowledge that due to technical reasons, Marina Ambramovic‘s name has not been spelled correctly in the following essay.

1 “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present“. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. March 14–May 31, 2010. Curated by Klaus Biesenbach.

2 Abramovic‘s endurance-performance in the atrium of the MoMA is very likely not the longest performance ever: The Taiwanese artist Teching Hsieh made performances that lasted a year– as the “New York Times” revealed in an article. This is also paradigmatic for the writing of history and for the mode of normative perception in the so-called “western world” – there are things that become part of the “official” history (if they are happening in the MoMA) and many things that happen nearly unnoticed (if they happen in Taiwan for example).

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/arts/design/ 31diva.html?scp=2&sq=marina%20abramovic&st=cse [accessed 31.05.2010] 3 See behind the scenes-videos of the Cleaning the House-workshop at http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/marinaabramovic/retreat_participants.html [accessed 17.05.2010] 4 See http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/marinaabramovic/index.html [accessed 05.17.2010] 5 Biesenbacj, Klaus; Christian, Mary (Ed.): Marina Abramovic.

The Artist Is Present. The Museum of Modern Art. New York 2010.

6 See Marina Abramovic: 7 easy pieces, Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2007.

7 See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/arts/design/ 12abromovic.html?scp=2&sq=marina%20abramovic&st=cse [accessed 17.05.2010] 8 I doubt that performance artists less known than Abramovic would get many offers from museum to have their performances reperformed constantly by specially trained performers during an exhibition of their works.

9 For more on this matter see my article: “Reenactments of Performances and the Potential of Calculated Failure“. In: Frakcija. Performing Arts Journal. No. 51/52, November 2009, p.

114-119. Here I cannot develop different definitions for the different terms but rather use the terms as they were employed in the projects I will refer to in the following. Abramovic i.e. uses the term re-performance for her MoMA-retrospective exhibition. She used the term re-enactment for Seven Easy Pieces. The Slovenian artist Janez Janša applies the term reconstruction for his own projects that base on performances of the 1960ies and 70ies.

10 i.e. in a public discussion following the performance of Pupilija at the Tanzquartier Vienna on the 11th November 2006.

11 Peggy Phelan: Unmarked. The Politics of Performance, London/New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 146.

12 See Claudia Jeschke: Re-Constructions: Recollection, History and Creation. In: Program-Booklet for the 2nd Biennale Tanzausbildung/Tanzplan Deutschland. Folkwang University Essen. March 2010, p. 15.

13 Marina Abramovic: Reenactment. Introduction. In: Marina Abramovic: 7 easy pieces, p. 10.

14 See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/arts/design/ 31diva.html?scp=2&sq=marina%20abramovic&st=cse [accessed 31.05.2010] 15 See i.e. Erika Fischer-Lichte: The transformative power of performance. A new aesthetics. London/New York: Routledge, 2008.

16 Erika Fischer-Lichte: Performance Art – Experiencing Liminality. In: Marina Abramovic: 7 easy pieces,p.33-45.

17 As stated by Abramovic in an interview.

See: http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/ 2010/marinaabramovic/marina_exhibition.html [accessed 17.05.2010] 18 See the video-interviews with the artist published on the homepage in conjunction with the MoMA-show: http://moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/marinaabramovic/marina_exhibition.html [accessed 17.05.2010] 19 Before museum-goers could sit with Abramovic – who was strictly guarded by security staff – they had to stand in line for hours and sign a form that they agree that they will be recorded on video and their picture will be taken by photographer Marco Anelli.

20 See http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/66163/ [accessed 31.05.2010] 21 See: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/ 2010/05/how_marina_abramovics_red_velv.html [accessed 31.05.2010] 22 See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/ arts/design/12abromovic.html?scp=2&sq= marina%20abramovic&st=cse [accessed 31.05.2010] 23 See: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/ 2010/03/saltz_i_made_genital_contact_a.html [accessed 19.05.2010] 24 See: http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/66161 [accessed 31.05.2010]

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0K – A Play in Five Acts On Sunday May 16, 2010, artist Per Hüttner and critic and curator Fatos Üstek presented a project that oscillated between a traditional talk and a performance at the Flat Time House, Peckham, London. The location is the former residence of conceptual artist John Latham, who has devised the idea of flat-time based on the theoretical physics of Event Structure. The house functions as an archive and research centre and hosts exhibitions and events. Üstek and Hüttner have been investigating the conditions of knowledge in non-ordinary realities, taking absolute boundaries of time, space and temperature into account. The play merged into investigations of notions such as travel, movement, time, volume while imagining zero Kelvin (absolute zero) as a point of reference and referring it back to their respective creative practises.

This text, carrying the same title as the event, is an outcome of the discussions the two have undertaken over a year on theorems of abstract mathematics, quantum mechanics, subjectivity, temporality, timelessness and knowledge.

This piece is the first of a three-part contribution, and is composed at 122K. In October Hüttner and Üstek will take a trip to Minnesota, U.S., to visit Robert Ettinger, the father of cryogenics and founder of Cryogenics Institute, Michigan. This trip will form the core of the two following ‘cold’ texts.

Act 1 -At the Flat-Time House 2 The door everyone has been staring at with anticipation opens and a small hurricane of cold air hits the audience. Two figures in space suits covered by layers of strange ice crystals enter. The high-tech space suits emit strange white smoke and as the two figures move, tiny chips of ice come off their suits and burn small holes in the carpet with a low ‘pffissching’ noise. Everyone in the audience is so still that you can reach out and poke at the silence. The strange astronauts take off their helmets revealing the head of a man and a woman.

They both look tired. But more than anything, they smile with great satisfaction and joy. The room is filled with applause and they hug.

But their ultra-cold space suits stick to each other. They are asked to put their helmets back on and the suits are sprayed with a special liquid that make them return to SF - 48

Per Hüttner and Fatos Üstek

room temperature. The two become unstuck. As soon as they get out of their suits they are given warm blankets to wrap their bodies in. People from the press ask questions and cameras flash.

“What do you have to say to the young students at home in Turkey?” a man with a big moustache asks.

“Well, they have to find their own way, keep reflecting on the present and continue to learn from art as well as from science,” she says.

“We from Berlin,” another moustache-clad man says, “would like to extend a special thank to you both.”

The two heroes bow their heads stiffly as if the man was Japanese rather than German.

“What does Berlin have to do with anything?” a fat middle-aged woman in the audience hollers, waving her cigarette.

“They both lived in Berlin, everyone knows that,” the German moustache says.

Act 2 – At His Flat Paris/Stockholm “How was your trip?”

“Terrible, the train caught on fire,” she says. “Look, now the whole station’s on fire!” They both look out the window and plumes of greyish red smoke come out of Gare du Nord and a lot of Charles Ray fire trucks stop in front of the station. An army of toy fire fighters get out their Lego hoses.

“This is horrible, let’s go to Stockholm,” he says as the smell of burning plastic enters the room.

They grab her luggage and go into the bathroom.

They both exit from the bathroom in Stockholm.

“I seem to have a lotus flower growing in my right lung.

Can you help me to pull it out?” she asks.

“Sure.”

She unbuttons her shirt. The plant is protruding from her chest right under her right collarbone. The root is sticking out five inches and is covered in smelly mud.

He pushes her against the wall, grabs the plant with both hands. He puts his right foot on her belly and pulls violently. She breathes loudly and pants like a dog and after a few minutes’ struggle, the flower comes out of her lung with a loud popping sound. He falls backwards and hits his back on the corner of the stove. He gets back up again and complains loudly.

“Are you OK, dear?” she says.

“Sure, are you?”

“Never been better, I will get a 0K bag for you.” She grabs a fist-sized white sack from the freezer and hits it

hard against the dinner table. It makes a fizzing sound and she holds it against his aching back. “Do you think that the way that thought travels is similar to travelling at the speed of light?” she sits down at the table.

“I guess so. That is why the mind can be free,” he says as the pain subsides. He turns around to serve her salad.

“But are we free when we travel?” she asks.

“It is up to you decide if you are free or not. I do not think there is such thing as objective freedom. That is an invention of desperate politicians and their ad executives.”

“What do you mean by freedom being an invention?”

“It is all about how you see yourself. Thinking that you can conquer the world, is the first step achieving something,” he says.

“Wow, how does that affect our idea about democracy?”

“Don’t even get me started. It suffices to say that most of us think that we are free on a conscious level, but unconsciously we create unsurpassable thresholds for ourselves. This is what elite schools do, they grind down these thresholds to create successful and visionary people.”

“Yes, I am with you,” she says dipping a piece of carrot in the humus. “What if you fall into a black hole when you are on your travels? Maybe we can call that a freedom since you can have no dependants of your movement? It is all a continuous oscillation that resonates as high as your initial speed of entry,” She smiles.

“Associating movement with thinking, the physical becoming the mental?” he asks, not knowing where the words come from.

“You could say that and you cannot at the same time,” she looks at him. “One does not compensate one another or replace differences, nor can they claim independence.”

“I am not sure I understand, but I know the place to go to find out.” He leads her back into the bathroom.

Act 3 – All Over the African Continent We see the man and the woman next to a sand desert bathroom. She is about 11 years old and goes over to him. He is old and immobile as if he were some age-old mummy. She gets up on the toilet seat and puts her hand in his mouth. He remains immobile while her hand and arm is in his mouth and she is searching for something in his guts. She pulls out a little lizard and throws it up SF - 49

in the air. It dashes behind a rock.

The scenery has changed. They are in green jungle. He comes alive and smiles. He becomes a teenager and she old and bent over a Zimmer frame. He makes her fall by placing his foot in front of her. She looks shocked and surprised (did she break her hip bone?). He leans down and looks into her open mouth. The lizard he pulls out of her is slightly bigger and louder. It hides behind the same rock.

The two sit down next to a campfire each rolling a cigarette. Everything is calm and they both look young and healthy. The rocks around the fire appear to be cheap props made of painted Styrofoam, but the jungle in the background is all the more real. As they smoke, enjoying the open sky, the two lizards have merged into one.

That lizard peers out from behind that same rock.

“I’m Raimundas, but you can call me The Wonderful Lizard of Oz”.

“Wow,” the two say at the same time.

“What did you put in this!”

“No way, I see it too” she says stubbing out the cigarette butt.

“Look,” the lizard says, “The agency sent me. I am here to set up a séance with you.” “A séance?” she snaps.

(As the words are uttered they find themselves in a market place full of crocodile and panther skins, selling water.)

“Yeah,” He becomes 68-years-old with long curly hair wearing bottle-bottom glasses. “That is ridiculous,” he adds.

They are both now playing with toy cars and glass balls in a street in Izmir among other kids.

“Irratio-,” as she speaks out, is interrupted by Raimundas.

“If you just acknowledge that both you and your surroundings change without interruption, you would be less inclined to speak about stupidity and irrationality. I am on tough schedule,” the lizard adds with evident boredom. “So we need to get the séance going. You have ordered a session with Mae Junod Ettinger.”

“Who? And whom do you say ordered the séance?” she asks.

“Mae Junod Ettinger,” the lizard looks annoyed.

“Strangely enough it does ring a bell. I see an image of Lake Michigan in the snow.” “Yes it is a future memory,” the lizard says. “Or it could be a memory transmitted by Mae. You need to be silent,” Raimundas says looking at him. “I am communicating with Mae.” “Huh, that cold bites with an attitude,” the voice of Mae rings out with an icy reverberation. “But it is better to SF - 50

be here than on the other side,” Mae goes on with her antiquated American accent. “How’s Robert? I miss him.”

Raimundas looks at the two of them and nods.

“He says that he misses you too,” he says.

“Liar,” Mae snaps. “He never said that to you.”

“Sorry,” he sulks.

“But it is true that he misses me a lot,” her voice is warm and motherly. “Don’t take my remark personally.”

“OK,” “I wish that it could be colder here. The closer I get to 0K, the calmer I feel,” Mae says.

“So you go back to the origin of the universe?” Raimundas says.

“You really are stuck in the stupid idea that you call science,” Mae replies with contempt.

“And what would you suggest takes its place?” the lizard asks.

“That is for you to figure out,” Mae replies frostily.

“Well,” says the lizard, “we are working on a premise where 0K, travelling at the speed of light is a source for anti-intuitive thinking that will help us to get unstuck in the intellectual void that we are in.”

“That is beautiful!” she says.

“It should be, you came up with it,” Mae says.

“I did?” she asks in awe.

“You are ruining everything Mae,” the lizard says.

“How do you want to continue this?”

“Time to get some flavours,” Mae says.

Africa and the Bromley foothills are sucked into a black hole and Istanbul takes its place. You can smell diesel in the air and a muezzin calls a prayer.

Act 4 - At Her House London/Istanbul.

“I have brought you a present,” he says and smiles.

“Thanks,” she takes the prettily wrapped box. She removes the red ribbon and opens the golden cube. She thinks about Swiss chocolate. He looks at her in anticipation.

“It is incomplete,” she looks inside the books with disappointment.

“That is the whole point,” he replies.

“Why would you like to give me such a present?” she looks at him with contempt. “It is the only present that we can share,” he smiles sadistically at her. “So, you create your own presents and your life is an infinite set of indistinguishable moments or presents.”

“That can only be defined in retrospect,” she retorts

dryly.

“Sure, but they still remain impossible to grasp. They are incoplete by default.”

“Why do you say ‘Incoplete’, you mean ‘Incomplete’ right?”

“No, I mean ‘incoplete’ because when it lacks the ‘m’ it proves its own ‘incompleteness’. The moment ‘incoplete’ without the ‘m’ becomes socially acceptable, written in all dictionaries it loses its functionality,” he says with great pride.

“Though incomplete is not a condition of lacking, it is a condition of the without, without knowing what is what you are with or without!” she argues passionately.

“So, as long an art expression remains ‘incomplete’ it is alive?” she is full of doubt. “Yes and it vibrates in its incompleteness in the present – that is why I gave you the present.”

“Thank you, this is very kind. However, I would argue differently. I would say that its incompleteness allows itself to resonate differently. If I was to example art as incomplete. And your present eludes my reception of the present(s)”.

“Maybe?” he has no idea what she says.

“So what would presence at 0K, travelling at the speed of light or in black matter be?” she asks.

“They are all beautiful fantasies, since all of these states are impossible for the human body to survive in. But on a theoretical level, it would be possible for us to actually live the present in any of these states,” he says (or was that her?).

“And I suspect that that moment would last an eternity,” “So, inside the box I can find a ticket to visit 0K?” she says.

“You might and you might well not.”

“Wow!” “What happened?”

“I received the images of our space suits, they look great and puffy.”

“You were expecting this, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but chances are that it will be gone when you step out of your space suit,” she sounds disappointed.

“I can live with that,” he smiles. “Now, we have to dance.”

“OK!” He puts on the music and they dance their way into their respective space suits.

An army of people from NASA appear all around them.

Peckham looks like Houston and Cape Canaveral rolled into one glorious wet dream of technology and the New Cross Mountains have never looked more majestic.

“Let’s take a picture,” she says.

Act 5 - At the Flat House # 1 “Let’s just calm down” he says “It doesn’t matter that you left your plug somewhere, we can still show the film on your computer.”

“Yeah, sure” she replies nervously. “This is not how I imagined it to be.”

“It is good to be here before travelling to 0K, and I am expecting some friends to show up. Anyway, do not worry, this is a potentiality of the present, something you could not prove it to be there, but now it is here.”

“Yes to achieve ‘incopleteness’ in real time,” she adds sarcastically (or was it him?).

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Contributors Soledad García–Saavedra is an independent curator with an MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research interests focus on the cross-cultural relations between science and art within the contexts of grids, laws and subversion.

Veronika Hauer * 1981, is a visual artist and writer. Lives and works in Vienna.

Helmut Heiss * 1976 in Bolzano, lives and works in Vienna. Recent projects: I LIKE THE WEATHER AND THE WEATHER W(H)ETHER LIKES ME...Interventionsraum, Stuttgart, 2010; BURNING HOUSE, Mackey Apartments, L.A. 2010; THE WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF, Hinterconti, Hamburg 2009. www.heisshelmut.priv.at Per Hüttner *1967 is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Paris. He was trained at Konsthögskolan, Stockholm and at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. He has shown extensively in Europe, North America, Australia and Asia, solo exhibitions include “Repetitive Time” at Göteborgs konstmuseum, “Xiao Yao You” at Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou and “I am a Curator” at Chisenhale Gallery in London. Participation in group shows include The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, ICA in London and Centro de Arte de Salamanca and the Liverpool Biennial. Four major monographs on the artists work have been published recently. Hüttner is the founder and director of the Vision Forum, a project based and experimental research program without geographical location. www.perhuttner.com Adeena Mey is a writer, translator and researcher and studied art theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His writing and translations have appeared in Sang Bleu, Flashart Online as well as other independant editorial projects. He has recently published “Christian Marclay’s Christmas Tales” (Helvetic Centre Editions). As an academic his work focuses on psychiatry and contemporary subjectivity in a Foucauldian perspective. He is currently working as a research associate at the Laboratory of Sociology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Jacopo Miliani, Milano, is an artist. Miliani works mostly with installation, photography and performative art. His investigation deals with a constant questioning of the role of representational systems inside cognitive and experiential process. In some of his works he reuses and modifies old photographs or images from the art world and cinema. His use of images shows a specific distortion and deception towards the practice of the viewer. Recent exhibitions: “Italian Wave”, Artissima, Turin; Biennial of Young Mediterranean Artist, Fiera del Levante, Bari; Loop Festival, Barcelona. He attended Platform Garanti International Residence Program in Istanbul in 2009.

Robert Müller lives and works in Vienna, Berlin and Basel.

Margit Neuhold * 1972 in Graz, where she currently lives and works. Neuhold studied Art History in Graz (1997–2002) and Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths University London (2007–2009), where her research project, “The Question of Participation. Urban Interstitial Pro-

duction as it responds to the Olympic Machine”, was graded with excellence. 2005–2008 she was curatorial assistant at Camera Austria, Graz (AT), where she has now resumed her position. As an independent writer and critic she contributes to artmagazine.cc, Camera Austria, NOWISWERE, artartart, and Kunst(h)art. As an independent art researcher she concentrates on visual culture, urban studies and their critical theory.

Astrid Peterle is an art historian, freelance author and curator. *1981 in Klagenfurt, based in Vienna. Studies of history and art history in Vienna and Berlin. 2009 doctorate, thesis title „Subversive? Political Potentials of body-representations: Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, Karen Finley, Mette Ingvartsen“. 2005-2008 DOC-Team-scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. 2006 visiting scholar at the graduate program of FU Berlin. 2007 visiting scholar at the Tisch School of the Arts/New York University. Articles on performance art, contemporary dance, photography and feminist theory for, amongst other, Women & Performance, Frakcija, n.paradoxa, Tanzjournal, CORPUS, MALMÖ. Memeber of the curatorial team of the FOTOGALERIE WIEN. Lisa Skuret is an independent writer and artist writing in the intersections of contemporary art, politics, and life.

Lisa received an AHRC supported MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College and she has produced art projects for live performance and online intervention. Her installation and moving image work has been programmed as part of the National Review of Live Art (NRLA), and the Dance on Screen Film Festival and she has collaborated for live performance including at the ICA and ROH2. Lisa’s forthcoming writing projects include publication essays on Sharif Waked and Lara Baladi. She is currently writing a series of pieces on ‘optimism’.

Rudolf Steckholzer is an artist lives and works in Vienna.

Niki Weitzer * 1975 in Vienna. 1993/94 Schule für künstlerische Photographie Wien, Friedl Kubelka. 1998 – 2004 Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, Brigitte Kowanz.

Lives and suffers in Vienna.

Fatos Üstek is an independent curator and art critic, lives in London works peripatetically.

Florian Zeyfang, Berlin, is an artist and videomaker. Since 2006, he is Professor for Moving Image at the Academy of Fine Arts in Umeå, Sweden. In the last years, he worked on experimental film/video and cinema through exhibition projects like 1,2,3… Avant-Gardes, Warschau/Stuttgart/Bilbao 2006/7/8, Poor Man´s Expression, Vienna/Berlin 2004/6, and Moving Spirit - Experimental Film in India, Halle 2006.

Publications include: I said I Love. That is the Promise. The TVideopolitics of Jean-Luc Godard (eds. James / Zeyfang, Berlin 2003), Florian Zeyfang: Fokussy (Frankfurt/M., 2004), 1,2,3… Avant-Gardes (eds. Ronduda / Zeyfang, Warsaw/Berlin 2007); Pabellón Cuba (eds. Schmidt-Colinet / Schmoeger / Valdes Figueroa / Zeyfang, Berlin 2008), and upcoming: Poor Man’s Expression (eds. Ebner / Zeyfang, Berlin 2010), Slow Narration Moving Still (Berlin, 2010)