Other than Yourself. An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Janet Cardiff Maurizio Cattelan Emanuel Danesch/David Rych Mario García Torres Amos Gitai Jenny Holzer Dennis Hopper Jonathan Horowitz Sanja Ivekovic´ Amar Kanwar David Lamelas Ján Mancˇusˇka Paul McCarthy Boris Ondreicˇka Sergio Prego Pipilotti Rist Hans Schabus Cindy Sherman Roman Signer Monika Sosnowska Slaven Tolj Salla Tykkä

an investigation

between inner and

outer space

ISBN 978-3-86560-423-1

OTY_Umschlag_280108.indd 1

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary www.tba21.org

T-B A21

9 783865 604231

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln

30.01.2008 10:53:03 Uhr

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Kรถnig, Kรถln

Edited by Gabrielle Cram and Daniela Zyman

Architecture / House

Refuge / Public Space

Self-Portrait

28 Amos Gitai 31 The House Trilogy

74 Emanuel Danesch/ David Rych The Bag

102 Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still

Monika Sosnowska 39 Endless Unfolding of (Spatial) Durée 36

Adam Budak

80 Sanja Ivekovic´ Triangle 83 Interview Barbara Horvath

4 Introduction

The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism

Daniela Zyman / Gabrielle Cram

Beatriz Colomina

42

Landscape / City

A Person as an Archive’s Function 84

10 David Lamelas 13 A Film in 5 Episodes.

Fifth Episode: London Eric de Bruyn

16 Hans Schabus 19 Mining the Multiply Folded Mountain Franz Xaver Baier

22 Mario García Torres Carta Abierta a Dr. Atl 25 Interview Gabrielle Cram

52

Ralph Rugoff

Textual Space 56 59

Boris Ondreicˇka Notes on Boris Ondreicˇka’s Work I am the Floor

Vít Havránek

62 Jenny Holzer 65 Tongues Bespoken Gabrielle Cram

68 Janet Cardiff 71 Intimacy. A Thin Layer of Deception Between Us Mirjam Schaub / Janet Cardiff

104

Maurizio Cattelan 107 Super-Noi (Torino) 108

Out of Place Revisited

Andreas Spiegl

Aristide Antonas

Paul McCarthy 54 Raw Footage

Soraya Rodríguez

Studio / Self-Experiment 90 93

Sergio Prego Time, Space, Material and Energy in Movement: the Labor of Sergio Prego

Peio Aguirre

96 Roman Signer 98 Roman Signer’s Acts of Wonder Gregory Volk

Dennis Hopper Life After on Canvas 100

112 Jonathan Horowitz Daily Mirror 114 Salla Tykkä 117 Pain, Pleasure, Guilt Soraya Rodríguez

The Body’s Space 120 122

Amar Kanwar The Lightning Testimonies

126 Pipilotti Rist 129 Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions) 131 Interview Daniela Zyman 132 Ján Mancˇus ˇka 134 The Other Gabrielle Cram 136

Slaven Tolj Untitled

Soraya Rodríguez

144

Imprint

Architecture / House

Refuge / Public Space

Self-Portrait

28 Amos Gitai 31 The House Trilogy

74 Emanuel Danesch/ David Rych The Bag

102 Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still

Monika Sosnowska 39 Endless Unfolding of (Spatial) Durée 36

Adam Budak

80 Sanja Ivekovic´ Triangle 83 Interview Barbara Horvath

4 Introduction

The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism

Daniela Zyman / Gabrielle Cram

Beatriz Colomina

42

Landscape / City

A Person as an Archive’s Function 84

10 David Lamelas 13 A Film in 5 Episodes.

Fifth Episode: London Eric de Bruyn

16 Hans Schabus 19 Mining the Multiply Folded Mountain Franz Xaver Baier

22 Mario García Torres Carta Abierta a Dr. Atl 25 Interview Gabrielle Cram

52

Ralph Rugoff

Textual Space 56 59

Boris Ondreicˇka Notes on Boris Ondreicˇka’s Work I am the Floor

Vít Havránek

62 Jenny Holzer 65 Tongues Bespoken Gabrielle Cram

68 Janet Cardiff 71 Intimacy. A Thin Layer of Deception Between Us Mirjam Schaub / Janet Cardiff

104

Maurizio Cattelan 107 Super-Noi (Torino) 108

Out of Place Revisited

Andreas Spiegl

Aristide Antonas

Paul McCarthy 54 Raw Footage

Soraya Rodríguez

Studio / Self-Experiment 90 93

Sergio Prego Time, Space, Material and Energy in Movement: the Labor of Sergio Prego

Peio Aguirre

96 Roman Signer 98 Roman Signer’s Acts of Wonder Gregory Volk

Dennis Hopper Life After on Canvas 100

112 Jonathan Horowitz Daily Mirror 114 Salla Tykkä 117 Pain, Pleasure, Guilt Soraya Rodríguez

The Body’s Space 120 122

Amar Kanwar The Lightning Testimonies

126 Pipilotti Rist 129 Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions) 131 Interview Daniela Zyman 132 Ján Mancˇus ˇka 134 The Other Gabrielle Cram 136

Slaven Tolj Untitled

Soraya Rodríguez

144

Imprint

Introduction Daniela Zyman / Gabrielle Cram

Private space is experienced as the extension of the self; in its simplest sense, it means that the space is mine. It is not neutral and not shared with others. If one lives in a situation in which the need for private space is not respected, one can suffer a denial of the self, a suffocation of the personal. There is a relationship between the sense of self and actual physical privacy, and there is a relationship between the self and what is mine. And yet the autonomy of the self rests on the paradox that autonomy must be provided for by the other. Enclosed within the self, the individual begins to doubt the reality of the outside.

The Soviet semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin has described the relationship of the self with the other, with the outside, as a situation that is always on the border, in which the interior and the exterior are in a constant process of realization: “Man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary; looking within himself, he looks in the eyes of the other or through the eyes of the other. … I cannot do without the other; I cannot become myself without the other; I must find myself in the other, finding the other in me (in mutual reflection and perception).

Justification cannot be justification of oneself, confession cannot be confession of oneself. I receive my name from the other, and this name exists for the other (to name oneself is to engage in usurpation).”1 The deeply internal experience occurs on the border; it comes through another, and its essence resides in this intense encounter; it is a situation of profound communication. With some pathos, one can say: To be means to be for the other, and through him/her, for oneself. It is this paradoxical nature of the self—to occupy a ter

ritory of both inner and outer space, to belong neither to the self nor to the other—that we have taken as a point of departure for the investigations and explorations undertaken by the exhibition Other than Yourself—An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space.

The fundamentally interrelated nature of the self has been the basis of a criticism of subjectivity as practiced by Richard Sennett and others.

As an outcome of the revolutionary sixties, the notion of the autonomy of the self and its full realization has often been combined with a cozy theorization of the intimate. The intimate is that space in which we all move a bit closer, close the gap, and create a society of equals. As Sennett has pointed out, this notion of intimacy is causing a sociological breakdown—The Fall of Public Man. The intimate creates not a situation of more civic equality, but a decline of responsibility for the other, a decline in social relations. Urbanity, for Sennett, begins as bodily experience, by seeing the other and being physically close to the other.

Social relations begin with bodies, and they develop through physical presence.

The problem of maintaining individuality in a fundamentally public condition is clearly one of the theoretical and practical dilemmas faced by psychoanalysis and phenomenology alike. Emmanuel Levinas spoke of maintaining the continuity of the self in the presence of the other as being “at home” (chez soi).2 The “at home” is a site where, “dependent on a reality that is other, I am, despite this dependence, free.” To be “at home” with one’s inner self is the opposite of dissociation and alienation. If one does not doubt the integrity and continuity of the private self, one is able to merge into the other and obtain knowledge from

others without surrendering one’s own private construction of reality.

There are many other sources that have inspired and guided our thinking about privacy and interiority and their relationship to the outside, the other, but mainly it is the artworks themselves that have laid the path through this broad and never-ending topic. It has become an exhibition that deals very extensively with the issue of spaces and the negotiations of being within them. The works, most drawn from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary collection, have allowed us to examine how various spatial orders are constructed along a shifting scale from intimate (body), to private (home), to interpersonal (social), to material / institutional (economic, political, cultural)—all based on an interdependent notion of the self. But the exhibition is not to be understood as a thematic display of artworks that seeks a seamless completeness in its representation of a topic. Rather it should be seen as a discursive field in which artworks enlarge the perception of privacy and/or intimacy, negotiating the more subtle and contradictory layers of these ideas.

The texts selected for this publication provide another format for such negotiation and investigation, emphasizing key aspects of the discourse initiated by writings such as those assembled in the widely recognized reader Sexuality and Space (1992), edited by Beatriz Colomina and including her essay The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism, engaging the gendered discourse on architectural/social spaces.3 Another two texts reflect on and extend the discussion: Andreas Spiegl’s essay Out of Place Revisited is the outline of his lecture presented in January of this year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna

Introduction Daniela Zyman / Gabrielle Cram

Private space is experienced as the extension of the self; in its simplest sense, it means that the space is mine. It is not neutral and not shared with others. If one lives in a situation in which the need for private space is not respected, one can suffer a denial of the self, a suffocation of the personal. There is a relationship between the sense of self and actual physical privacy, and there is a relationship between the self and what is mine. And yet the autonomy of the self rests on the paradox that autonomy must be provided for by the other. Enclosed within the self, the individual begins to doubt the reality of the outside.

The Soviet semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin has described the relationship of the self with the other, with the outside, as a situation that is always on the border, in which the interior and the exterior are in a constant process of realization: “Man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary; looking within himself, he looks in the eyes of the other or through the eyes of the other. … I cannot do without the other; I cannot become myself without the other; I must find myself in the other, finding the other in me (in mutual reflection and perception).

Justification cannot be justification of oneself, confession cannot be confession of oneself. I receive my name from the other, and this name exists for the other (to name oneself is to engage in usurpation).”1 The deeply internal experience occurs on the border; it comes through another, and its essence resides in this intense encounter; it is a situation of profound communication. With some pathos, one can say: To be means to be for the other, and through him/her, for oneself. It is this paradoxical nature of the self—to occupy a ter

ritory of both inner and outer space, to belong neither to the self nor to the other—that we have taken as a point of departure for the investigations and explorations undertaken by the exhibition Other than Yourself—An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space.

The fundamentally interrelated nature of the self has been the basis of a criticism of subjectivity as practiced by Richard Sennett and others.

As an outcome of the revolutionary sixties, the notion of the autonomy of the self and its full realization has often been combined with a cozy theorization of the intimate. The intimate is that space in which we all move a bit closer, close the gap, and create a society of equals. As Sennett has pointed out, this notion of intimacy is causing a sociological breakdown—The Fall of Public Man. The intimate creates not a situation of more civic equality, but a decline of responsibility for the other, a decline in social relations. Urbanity, for Sennett, begins as bodily experience, by seeing the other and being physically close to the other.

Social relations begin with bodies, and they develop through physical presence.

The problem of maintaining individuality in a fundamentally public condition is clearly one of the theoretical and practical dilemmas faced by psychoanalysis and phenomenology alike. Emmanuel Levinas spoke of maintaining the continuity of the self in the presence of the other as being “at home” (chez soi).2 The “at home” is a site where, “dependent on a reality that is other, I am, despite this dependence, free.” To be “at home” with one’s inner self is the opposite of dissociation and alienation. If one does not doubt the integrity and continuity of the private self, one is able to merge into the other and obtain knowledge from

others without surrendering one’s own private construction of reality.

There are many other sources that have inspired and guided our thinking about privacy and interiority and their relationship to the outside, the other, but mainly it is the artworks themselves that have laid the path through this broad and never-ending topic. It has become an exhibition that deals very extensively with the issue of spaces and the negotiations of being within them. The works, most drawn from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary collection, have allowed us to examine how various spatial orders are constructed along a shifting scale from intimate (body), to private (home), to interpersonal (social), to material / institutional (economic, political, cultural)—all based on an interdependent notion of the self. But the exhibition is not to be understood as a thematic display of artworks that seeks a seamless completeness in its representation of a topic. Rather it should be seen as a discursive field in which artworks enlarge the perception of privacy and/or intimacy, negotiating the more subtle and contradictory layers of these ideas.

The texts selected for this publication provide another format for such negotiation and investigation, emphasizing key aspects of the discourse initiated by writings such as those assembled in the widely recognized reader Sexuality and Space (1992), edited by Beatriz Colomina and including her essay The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism, engaging the gendered discourse on architectural/social spaces.3 Another two texts reflect on and extend the discussion: Andreas Spiegl’s essay Out of Place Revisited is the outline of his lecture presented in January of this year at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna

as part of the symposium Theorie und Affekt (Theory and Affect), organized by Marie-Luise Angerer and Sabeth Buchmann. The symposium was characterized by a certain nonconformity or even uncertainty toward a theory of affect, in the sense of not yet having identified a simple definition of what it might mean. One could even interpret the discussion as an effort to keep the uncertainty alive as an attempt toward a more (in-)appropriate definition. The text A Person as an Archive’s Function by Aristide Antonas is adapted from his longer text Residing in Archives, which he wrote in the context of the opening of the new tranzitdisplay spaces in Prague in November 2007. The text is a contribution to Monument to Transformation, an artistic and investigative project in process initiated by Zbyne ˇk Baladrán and Vít Havránek. For this publication Antonas shifted his analysis of the archive to the personal, bodily-related aspects.

When we approached the authors to request permission to publish their preexisting texts, we were surprised to find how readily they not only agreed to allow us to borrow their texts but also spontaneously engaged in rewriting, revisiting, and recontextualizing their own writings to suit the proposed new context, focusing on specific aspects of their originals and adapting them to another situation. We hope that the exhibition, in its various aspects, will continue to inspire dialogue and to motivate provocative and transformative discussion. Other than Yourself—An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space introduces and juxtaposes diverse ways of using, unfolding, or dealing with privacy/intimacy by contextualizing and addressing parameters such as specific times, sites, events, and topics, thereby retracing an open and fragmented history of the private/intimate and its multilayered shifts in recent artistic practice.

Intimacy can be spatialized as a private domain that individuals literally carry around with them wherever they go, a portable territory, as can be seen in The Bag, a work by Emanuel Danesch and David Rych that takes the form of a body bag, allowing those who carry or wear it to feel protected and in control of their bodies. Ján Mancˇuška’s The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see) captures the act of a woman, or wife, painting her husband

black in all the places of his body that he can’t see without a mirror, or in reflection. The issues of private versus public space are here visually played out as the spaces or parts of one’s body that are public, are exactly those that off limits to one’s own sight. Paul McCarthy transforms public figures into puppetish characters whose actions are reduced to instinctive bodily enactments such as aggression, self-destruction, obsession, and helplessness.

For Cindy Sherman, as for Salla Tykkä, self-portraiture is a means to analyze and negotiate multiple and shifting cultural identities. In 1977, Sherman began a series of photographic works in which she staged herself as female characters from Hollywood B movies of the 1950s and 1960s. In her works Tykkä addresses the perplexities of adolescence, expressing an inner world of sexuality, pain, awakening, and longing: a young woman at home, covering herself with fur; her silhouette behind a sunlit curtain.

Maurizio Cattelan’s series of fictional portraits represent in a sense a suffocation of the self, as the relationship between the psychological space of the individual and his representation is undermined by the missing reference to the original model. Jonathan Horowitz investigates and confuses the projected/medial views of the popular figure Kate Moss by putting a (self-)projection of the visitor at the center of his Daily Mirror. The visitor becomes an archaeologist searching for the traces of the remains of the familiar—on/ through him/herself. The idea that reading could itself constitute a privileged part of the notion of privacy was raised by the Romantics with their cultivation of Innerlichkeit as a process of inner healing. In Janet Cardiff’s The Walk Book, reading and being guided by an alluring, prosodic voice create a completely absorbing experience in which now and here dissipate into multiple fictionalized layers of time and space.

The home embodies a history shared with other members of the household or with other/former inhabitants; the space then becomes stratified, contested, temporalized. In Amos Gitai’s film trilogy House, story and history meet as the private destinies of a house’s successive inhabitants trace the intertwined loops of Palestinian and Israeli history. In her architectural installation Monika Sosnowska carries ad absurdum the nor-

mative classifications of Polish apartments under socialism. She leaves the visitor in a state of visceral confusion, located on the blurred border between physical and mental disorientation—a futile attempt to both represent and escape the system. Here space is conceived as the unhomely house inhabited by the repressed and understood as imprisonment/trap/memory-loaded psycho-sculpture, in which the psychological subject—in presentia or by inference—is at the center of the representational discourse. Sanja Ivekovic´’s Triangle, in which the artist simulated intimate acts on her balcony while a presidential motorcade passed by on the street below, reveals the difficulty of defending private space against the totalitarian order.

The studio in its largest sense serves as an encapsulated space/refuge for artistic experimentation, excluding viewers from the moment of creation and permitting access only at a later stage of publicness. Here the artist is also the subject of action and becomes the interface between already informed, never separated, but always interfering/overlapping/intermixed outer and inner realities, while artistic practice becomes the tool/medium for negotiating multiple relationships.

Roman Signer documents his ephemeral, mostly impish actions with film and video, at times exposing himself to dangerous or borderline situations.

Dennis Hopper performs a cataclysmic self-explosion with a Russian Death-Chair that would symbolize the end of an era of drug intake and psychodelic expression. Slaven Tolj uses light bulbs assembled on a cable wrapped around his naked body and unscrews and extinguished them one by one, remaining in the end in darkness, in silence.

Sergio Prego also films his own actions and translates his experiences and self-awareness into experimental techniques that make it possible to freeze or extend short moments and events thus making them visible. Hans Schabus excludes the public altogether, gliding through the darkness and refuse of Vienna’s sewer system in a homemade sailboat. Pipilotti Rist’s artistic practice can be understood as a constant remix, as she reedits and reinstalls projected images, sounds, objects and her own work. In Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions), she drags the visitor into a maze of transparent curtains hung in a dark space lit only by the projections that wander over its surfaces, fragmenting themselves in the process.

In the work of Boris Ondreicˇka the provision of furniture and structural features (walls, ceiling) appears to personalize the space, dividing it into small territories for particular functions. These fixtures provide for the coherence and continuity of the self, a homeostatic condition of stability within the destabilizing anonymity of the everyday. Similarly, in Jenny Holzer’s Arno—poems carved into marble benches—the all-too-private, the ineffable, is literally/physically inscribed into the space/body.

The layers of privacy that ensure the territories of the self attain greater complexity, however, when placed within the layers of outer space. In David Lamelas’s and Mario García Torres’s filmic works, the art space is positioned within landscapes of narratives, which temporalize space within social and linguistic frameworks. Lamelas’s film A Study of Relationships between Inner and Outer Space is a constant investigation and negotiation between interior and exterior, always operating on both sides of the divide, never placing itself wholly outside it. García Torres’s Open Letter to Dr. Atl is a one-way letter exchange with a dead artist, discussing with him the implications of installing a Guggenheim Museum somewhere in the unspoiled Mexican landscape. García Torres’s work is about imagining a space in which something may (also retrospectively) or may not have happened; he creates a potential scenario/frame in which events become possible, thus visible, thus negotiable.

In Amar Kanwar’s video installation in the project gallery, the gendered (private) space of violence becomes a space of public appearance (Hannah Arendt), as a group of women disrobe in a public protest and lastingly alter the symbolic realm of social representation. Kanwar illustrates the process that leads from the embodiment of traditional roles and assigned scripts as wives, mothers, and victims to the emergence of transformative subjects in spite of the threat posed by acts of public protest. The women succeeded not only in altering the perception of public space but also in inscribing their own stories into the spatial order.

1. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984, p. 96 2 . Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, 1961 3. Beatriz Colomina, The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism, in: Sexuality and Space, Ed. Colomina, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1992, pp. 73-98

as part of the symposium Theorie und Affekt (Theory and Affect), organized by Marie-Luise Angerer and Sabeth Buchmann. The symposium was characterized by a certain nonconformity or even uncertainty toward a theory of affect, in the sense of not yet having identified a simple definition of what it might mean. One could even interpret the discussion as an effort to keep the uncertainty alive as an attempt toward a more (in-)appropriate definition. The text A Person as an Archive’s Function by Aristide Antonas is adapted from his longer text Residing in Archives, which he wrote in the context of the opening of the new tranzitdisplay spaces in Prague in November 2007. The text is a contribution to Monument to Transformation, an artistic and investigative project in process initiated by Zbyne ˇk Baladrán and Vít Havránek. For this publication Antonas shifted his analysis of the archive to the personal, bodily-related aspects.

When we approached the authors to request permission to publish their preexisting texts, we were surprised to find how readily they not only agreed to allow us to borrow their texts but also spontaneously engaged in rewriting, revisiting, and recontextualizing their own writings to suit the proposed new context, focusing on specific aspects of their originals and adapting them to another situation. We hope that the exhibition, in its various aspects, will continue to inspire dialogue and to motivate provocative and transformative discussion. Other than Yourself—An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space introduces and juxtaposes diverse ways of using, unfolding, or dealing with privacy/intimacy by contextualizing and addressing parameters such as specific times, sites, events, and topics, thereby retracing an open and fragmented history of the private/intimate and its multilayered shifts in recent artistic practice.

Intimacy can be spatialized as a private domain that individuals literally carry around with them wherever they go, a portable territory, as can be seen in The Bag, a work by Emanuel Danesch and David Rych that takes the form of a body bag, allowing those who carry or wear it to feel protected and in control of their bodies. Ján Mancˇuška’s The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see) captures the act of a woman, or wife, painting her husband

black in all the places of his body that he can’t see without a mirror, or in reflection. The issues of private versus public space are here visually played out as the spaces or parts of one’s body that are public, are exactly those that off limits to one’s own sight. Paul McCarthy transforms public figures into puppetish characters whose actions are reduced to instinctive bodily enactments such as aggression, self-destruction, obsession, and helplessness.

For Cindy Sherman, as for Salla Tykkä, self-portraiture is a means to analyze and negotiate multiple and shifting cultural identities. In 1977, Sherman began a series of photographic works in which she staged herself as female characters from Hollywood B movies of the 1950s and 1960s. In her works Tykkä addresses the perplexities of adolescence, expressing an inner world of sexuality, pain, awakening, and longing: a young woman at home, covering herself with fur; her silhouette behind a sunlit curtain.

Maurizio Cattelan’s series of fictional portraits represent in a sense a suffocation of the self, as the relationship between the psychological space of the individual and his representation is undermined by the missing reference to the original model. Jonathan Horowitz investigates and confuses the projected/medial views of the popular figure Kate Moss by putting a (self-)projection of the visitor at the center of his Daily Mirror. The visitor becomes an archaeologist searching for the traces of the remains of the familiar—on/ through him/herself. The idea that reading could itself constitute a privileged part of the notion of privacy was raised by the Romantics with their cultivation of Innerlichkeit as a process of inner healing. In Janet Cardiff’s The Walk Book, reading and being guided by an alluring, prosodic voice create a completely absorbing experience in which now and here dissipate into multiple fictionalized layers of time and space.

The home embodies a history shared with other members of the household or with other/former inhabitants; the space then becomes stratified, contested, temporalized. In Amos Gitai’s film trilogy House, story and history meet as the private destinies of a house’s successive inhabitants trace the intertwined loops of Palestinian and Israeli history. In her architectural installation Monika Sosnowska carries ad absurdum the nor-

mative classifications of Polish apartments under socialism. She leaves the visitor in a state of visceral confusion, located on the blurred border between physical and mental disorientation—a futile attempt to both represent and escape the system. Here space is conceived as the unhomely house inhabited by the repressed and understood as imprisonment/trap/memory-loaded psycho-sculpture, in which the psychological subject—in presentia or by inference—is at the center of the representational discourse. Sanja Ivekovic´’s Triangle, in which the artist simulated intimate acts on her balcony while a presidential motorcade passed by on the street below, reveals the difficulty of defending private space against the totalitarian order.

The studio in its largest sense serves as an encapsulated space/refuge for artistic experimentation, excluding viewers from the moment of creation and permitting access only at a later stage of publicness. Here the artist is also the subject of action and becomes the interface between already informed, never separated, but always interfering/overlapping/intermixed outer and inner realities, while artistic practice becomes the tool/medium for negotiating multiple relationships.

Roman Signer documents his ephemeral, mostly impish actions with film and video, at times exposing himself to dangerous or borderline situations.

Dennis Hopper performs a cataclysmic self-explosion with a Russian Death-Chair that would symbolize the end of an era of drug intake and psychodelic expression. Slaven Tolj uses light bulbs assembled on a cable wrapped around his naked body and unscrews and extinguished them one by one, remaining in the end in darkness, in silence.

Sergio Prego also films his own actions and translates his experiences and self-awareness into experimental techniques that make it possible to freeze or extend short moments and events thus making them visible. Hans Schabus excludes the public altogether, gliding through the darkness and refuse of Vienna’s sewer system in a homemade sailboat. Pipilotti Rist’s artistic practice can be understood as a constant remix, as she reedits and reinstalls projected images, sounds, objects and her own work. In Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions), she drags the visitor into a maze of transparent curtains hung in a dark space lit only by the projections that wander over its surfaces, fragmenting themselves in the process.

In the work of Boris Ondreicˇka the provision of furniture and structural features (walls, ceiling) appears to personalize the space, dividing it into small territories for particular functions. These fixtures provide for the coherence and continuity of the self, a homeostatic condition of stability within the destabilizing anonymity of the everyday. Similarly, in Jenny Holzer’s Arno—poems carved into marble benches—the all-too-private, the ineffable, is literally/physically inscribed into the space/body.

The layers of privacy that ensure the territories of the self attain greater complexity, however, when placed within the layers of outer space. In David Lamelas’s and Mario García Torres’s filmic works, the art space is positioned within landscapes of narratives, which temporalize space within social and linguistic frameworks. Lamelas’s film A Study of Relationships between Inner and Outer Space is a constant investigation and negotiation between interior and exterior, always operating on both sides of the divide, never placing itself wholly outside it. García Torres’s Open Letter to Dr. Atl is a one-way letter exchange with a dead artist, discussing with him the implications of installing a Guggenheim Museum somewhere in the unspoiled Mexican landscape. García Torres’s work is about imagining a space in which something may (also retrospectively) or may not have happened; he creates a potential scenario/frame in which events become possible, thus visible, thus negotiable.

In Amar Kanwar’s video installation in the project gallery, the gendered (private) space of violence becomes a space of public appearance (Hannah Arendt), as a group of women disrobe in a public protest and lastingly alter the symbolic realm of social representation. Kanwar illustrates the process that leads from the embodiment of traditional roles and assigned scripts as wives, mothers, and victims to the emergence of transformative subjects in spite of the threat posed by acts of public protest. The women succeeded not only in altering the perception of public space but also in inscribing their own stories into the spatial order.

1. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984, p. 96 2 . Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, 1961 3. Beatriz Colomina, The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism, in: Sexuality and Space, Ed. Colomina, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1992, pp. 73-98

David Lamelas Hans Schabus Mario García Torres Amos Gitai Monika Sosnowska Paul McCarthy Boris Ondreicˇka Jenny Holzer Janet Cardiff Emanuel Danesch / David Rych Sanja Ivekovic´ Sergio Prego Roman Signer Dennis Hopper Cindy Sherman Maurizio Cattelan Jonathan Horowitz Salla Tykkä Amar Kanwar Pipilotti Rist Ján Mancˇusˇka Slaven Tolj

David Lamelas Hans Schabus Mario García Torres Amos Gitai Monika Sosnowska Paul McCarthy Boris Ondreicˇka Jenny Holzer Janet Cardiff Emanuel Danesch / David Rych Sanja Ivekovic´ Sergio Prego Roman Signer Dennis Hopper Cindy Sherman Maurizio Cattelan Jonathan Horowitz Salla Tykkä Amar Kanwar Pipilotti Rist Ján Mancˇusˇka Slaven Tolj

*1946 in Buenos Aires, Argentina A Study of Relationships between Inner and Outer Space, 1969 Single-channel video projection (16mm film transferred to DVD) 20 min, b/w, sound Courtesy of the artist and LUX

*1946 in Buenos Aires, Argentina A Study of Relationships between Inner and Outer Space, 1969 Single-channel video projection (16mm film transferred to DVD) 20 min, b/w, sound Courtesy of the artist and LUX

A Film in 5 Episodes Fifth Episode: London Eric de Bruyn

After leaving Buenos Aires in 1968, Lamelas traveled to London by way of the Venice Biennial.

In London he studied at St. Martin’s School of Art, where Anthony Caro was one of his tutors. Until 1976, when he moved to Los Angeles, Lamelas lived on-and-off in London. It was during this same period that Lamelas’ work entered a transitional stage, moving from the mode of institutional critique embodied in such works as the Office of Information, A Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space (London, 1969), or Time As Activity (­Düsseldorf, 1970), to what may be described as a counter-narrative model of cinema, in such films as Cumulative Script (London, 1971), Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning) (London, 1972) and The Desert People. While the earlier works took the institutional site of exhibition as their locus of critique, the later works took the narrative space of cinema as their terrain of subversion.

A Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space is the first film that Lamelas shot with the help of a professional crew. Executed for a group show at the Camden Arts Center in London, A Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space performs a parody of the sociological survey in the vein of Film 18 Paris IV.70 (see episode five). With deadpan humor, the London film makes a structural analysis of the relationship “between a certain place environment and its system of use.” First the film makes an inventory of the characteristics of the gallery interior (physical dimensions, lighting, acoustics), then it examines the various “activities which take place on an average day,” such as closing and opening doors or switching the lights on and off.

Next the various administrative functions of the staff are presented: a Jamaican guard, a female 12

clerk and a white British supervisor explain their duties. As the frame of vision widens ever further, the camera transports us outside the museum, in order that we may be informed about the means of communication and transportation that are available in London and the peculiarities of its micro-climate. In a final twist of irony, Lamelas interpellates unsuspecting passers-by with confrontational questions on the main media event of the day, namely, the Apollo 10 flight to the moon: “Would you be surprised if the first man on the moon was black?” And so, as the camera pulls back into “outer space”, we are led to imagine the camera as a kind of satellite hovering above the scene. Yet, this surveillance of the social network never coheres into a meaningful whole; the topologies of information escape representation.

While A Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space and Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning) both employ a systemic method of analysis, the later film does not take a dissection of the panoptic gaze of surveillance as its topic. Instead, Film Script (Manipulation and Meaning) turns the systemic method analysis back on to the narrative structure of film. “The idea was to show how fact can be manipulated through film—because of censorship, commercial aims or political manipulation, for example.”1 This installation consists of a silent film loop that shows a series of scenes involving a single woman: she walks in a park, gets into a car, enters a building, sits at a desk, answers a telephone. The film is projected together with three slide shows, each one re-assembling the filmic sequence according to a different pattern. The first slide projector replicates the original, diegetic succession, the second one has completely scrambled the original order, and the third shows only specific 13

A Film in 5 Episodes Fifth Episode: London Eric de Bruyn

After leaving Buenos Aires in 1968, Lamelas traveled to London by way of the Venice Biennial.

In London he studied at St. Martin’s School of Art, where Anthony Caro was one of his tutors. Until 1976, when he moved to Los Angeles, Lamelas lived on-and-off in London. It was during this same period that Lamelas’ work entered a transitional stage, moving from the mode of institutional critique embodied in such works as the Office of Information, A Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space (London, 1969), or Time As Activity (­Düsseldorf, 1970), to what may be described as a counter-narrative model of cinema, in such films as Cumulative Script (London, 1971), Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning) (London, 1972) and The Desert People. While the earlier works took the institutional site of exhibition as their locus of critique, the later works took the narrative space of cinema as their terrain of subversion.

A Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space is the first film that Lamelas shot with the help of a professional crew. Executed for a group show at the Camden Arts Center in London, A Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space performs a parody of the sociological survey in the vein of Film 18 Paris IV.70 (see episode five). With deadpan humor, the London film makes a structural analysis of the relationship “between a certain place environment and its system of use.” First the film makes an inventory of the characteristics of the gallery interior (physical dimensions, lighting, acoustics), then it examines the various “activities which take place on an average day,” such as closing and opening doors or switching the lights on and off.

Next the various administrative functions of the staff are presented: a Jamaican guard, a female 12

clerk and a white British supervisor explain their duties. As the frame of vision widens ever further, the camera transports us outside the museum, in order that we may be informed about the means of communication and transportation that are available in London and the peculiarities of its micro-climate. In a final twist of irony, Lamelas interpellates unsuspecting passers-by with confrontational questions on the main media event of the day, namely, the Apollo 10 flight to the moon: “Would you be surprised if the first man on the moon was black?” And so, as the camera pulls back into “outer space”, we are led to imagine the camera as a kind of satellite hovering above the scene. Yet, this surveillance of the social network never coheres into a meaningful whole; the topologies of information escape representation.

While A Study of the Relationships between Inner and Outer Space and Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning) both employ a systemic method of analysis, the later film does not take a dissection of the panoptic gaze of surveillance as its topic. Instead, Film Script (Manipulation and Meaning) turns the systemic method analysis back on to the narrative structure of film. “The idea was to show how fact can be manipulated through film—because of censorship, commercial aims or political manipulation, for example.”1 This installation consists of a silent film loop that shows a series of scenes involving a single woman: she walks in a park, gets into a car, enters a building, sits at a desk, answers a telephone. The film is projected together with three slide shows, each one re-assembling the filmic sequence according to a different pattern. The first slide projector replicates the original, diegetic succession, the second one has completely scrambled the original order, and the third shows only specific 13

moments, while dropping one scene all together.

The completion of the film cycle is itself indicated by an unexpected act by the woman, who suddenly turns around to directly confront the camera. At this point, the forward movement of time is halted, the gaze of the woman (or is it the camera’s?) is petrified in a static freeze frame.

Film Script is wholly constructed, from what Roland Barthes called “catalyzer” functions.2 These are supplementary types of action, a kind of filler material, that serve to delay or accelerate the pace of the narrative. But catalyzers do not determine the direction of the story, which is key to my argument. The “cardinal” functions, on the other hand, name those decisive moments in a plot where a character is forced to choose between alternative courses of action. The cardinal functions provide the narrative with its destiny, as I said, these are absent in Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning).

The installation confuses the difference between these functions; it mixes their codes.

On several different occasions Lamelas has stated that Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning) actually quotes from the John Schlesinger movie Sunday Bloody Sunday, which was released during the previous year. The exact reference to this movie, however, is not at all that significant.

Lamelas selected a series of shots that in Barthes’ terms were not cardinal, but could serve a catalyzing function in almost any movie. In other words, what is of significance is Lamelas’ structuralist comprehension of cinema as an archive or repository of narrative functions and representational motifs. Just as Lamelas’ previous films played with the organizational rules of the social archive, he would not begin to investigate the syntactical rules of narrative cinema. But this in turn would lead him to consider cinema not just as a timeless, combinatory system of narrative elements, but as a stratified space of popular memory. In order to further clarify this shift to an archival notion of cinema in Lamelas’ work, I shall now turn to another textual reference of Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning), namely Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up.

Antonioni’s movie can be added to the previous examples of cultural dis-location that I have tracked in these pages. Set in London, Blow-up was made by an Italian director, but was based on a text by the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar (Las babas del Diablo) that was located in Paris. Today, such a transnational set of coordinates are a regular 14

aspect of European cinema. In fact, European filmmaking has entered a largely post-national stage since the 1980’s, and references to “national identity” in cinema now operate either as a form of branding (on the global market), or have adopted a highly self-conscious, even ironic character.3 The Light at the Edge of a Nightmare might be taken as perfect example of this post-national condition of cinema. The initial reception of Blow-up, however, was a more complex affair. Antonioni was widely viewed as an exponent of an Italian auteur cinema who could only look at the culture of London from outside, but not feel its inner workings.

The confusion surrounding the Britishness of the movie is striking, since Blow-up was to be about the surface of the media spectacle. While Blow-up intended to portray the new pop scene in London— which in Lamelas’ mind would form a counterfoil to the intellectual milieu of Paris—Antonioni famously stated in an interview that “it was born in London, but it is not an English film.” Apparently, it had not yet been decided in 1966 whether the merging of advertising, art, fashion, and rock-and-roll that is portrayed in Blow-up constituted a strictly local or a more global phenomenon. I would venture, however, that what interested both Antonioni and Lamelas in the cultural scene of London was the manner in which the mass media colluded in its fabrication.

Lest we forget, the main character of Blow-up, Thomas, is a fashion photographer. And while Thomas appears to assume the external, detached position of a voyeur—he masquerades as homeless, for instance, to shoot a social documentary, but his interest in the topic is purely aesthetic—the film gradually reveals that even the identity of Thomas is contingent upon the field of media representation. The movie, as Antonioni states, is about the disturbed relation of this photographer to reality.4 Thomas discovers a murder when he re-examines some photographs he took of a couple in a park, but he is not concerned with solving the crime. (The narratives of film noir have lost their symbolic power.) He seeks the corpse only so he may take its photograph and finish the photographic narrative he began. (Thomas sees and touches the dead body, but fails to take its picture.) In the end, the mistrust of the referential evidence of photography that is instilled within Thomas, will not only undermine his sense of reality, but, by default, disrupt the coherence of the filmic reality that is experienced by the spectator as well. A series of disappearances is set in motion by the movie: first the corpse vanishes, then

the girl disappears, the photographs follow in rapid succession, and ultimately the photographer is wiped off the screen.

What may we conclude from this brief consideration of Antonioni’s film? First of all, Blow-up approaches filmmaking as a kind of structuralist activity. The photographer is engaged in the constructive practice of the assembling of reality, just as the woman in Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning) shuffles through a stack of black and white photographs, or the slide projectors keep reorganizing the filmic sequence.5 Cinema has become aware of itself as a sign system and it now makes conscious use of this property. But this structural self-analysis of the media also undermines our trust in the objective existence of the world. A fundamental phenomenological doubt has set in, since there is no external position, no objective referent against which to check the truth of the image. Or perhaps we need to accept that the truth of the image only resides in its performance? Lamelas proposes in the early seventies that reality is only to be understood as the product of the mass media or, at the very least, that the relation of the image to reality can not always be directly apprehended. Lamelas uses the media in order to critique the media, but he also understands by 1972 that neither the aesthetic of pure information suffices, nor the parodic model of the social survey. This time he will take the power of the media to glamorize the world seriously. The seductiveness of the media spectacle was the lesson to be gained from Blowup—Antonioni’s most commercially successful movie—and he put this lesson to good use in the photographic series of Rock Star (Character Appropriation) (1974). This investigation of the performative conditions of identity within our media society would prefigure much of the theoretical and artistic debates of the 1980’s.

Finally, it is an archival comprehension of cinema that becomes most prominent in Lamelas’ practice after 1972. This archival model of cinema recycles the utopian myths of our past in dissynchrony with our present, as my text has attempted to demonstrate. The mass media have replaced most of our lived memory; they stand guard over our collective practices of commemoration. But this does not mean that the cinematic archive is detached from the material specificities of a social history. While images may be plucked at random from its memory bank, the mythical configurations that cinema has produced over time are tagged to

their respective historical conditions of production. It is this historical trait of the cinematic image, which becomes more and more attenuated in the present, that Lamelas’ latest work ponders. What Lamelas’ filmic practice cannot do, is counter the condition of “anomic fragmentation” (Buchloh’s phrase) that is endemic to the media spectacle. A condition that is equally responsible for the dispersive, episodic structure of my own text. But what Lamelas’ practice can do is work through this dispersive state of the media and remind us of its former utopian potential, of the collective dreams it dreamt, without wanting to recoup this past for the present or, even worse, lapse into an attitude of nostalgia.

Today we can witness any number of archival projects that employ the means of cinema. Many examples from the work of Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe, Stan Douglas, Matthew Buckingham, or Johan Grimonprez come readily to mind.6 But this archival model of filmic practice was preceded in the 1970’s by such artists as David Lamelas and his close friend Marcel Broodthaers. And, of course, by the films of Jean-Luc Godard, who has been glaringly absent in the preceding discussion. When I asked Lamelas why he never mentions Godard as a kind of artistic mentor, he explained to me that this was probably due to the fact that Godard already makes “the same kind of references” that he does. Clearly, the archival method is not about putting into practice what is already familiar to oneself. Or, as Lamelas simply put it: “I had more to learn from Antonioni.”

1. Lamelas in: David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time, Düsseldorf, 1997, p. 86 2 . Roland Barthes, Introduction to the Structuralist Analysis of Narrative, in: idem, Image-Music-Text, New York, 1977, pp. 79-124 3. See Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Holywood, Amsterdam, 2005 4. Antonioni, Moravia dialoga con Antonioni, in: Daniel Mario Lopez and Alberto Eduardo Ojam (eds.), Antonioni/Cortázar, Blow-up, Buenos Aires, 1968, p. 103 The passage is cited by Seymour Chatman in Antonioni, or The Surface of the World, Berkeley, 1985, p. 141 5 . Jurij Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema, Ann Arbor, 1976, as cited by Seymour Chatman, in Antonioni, or The Surface of the World, Berkeley, 1985, p. 259Berkeley, 1985, p. 141 6 . See Jean-Christophe Royoux, Remaking Cinema, in: Cinéma Cinéma: Contemporary Art and the Cinematic Experience, Eindhoven, 1999, pp. 21-27 and Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, in: October, No. 110, Fall 2004, pp. 3-22 Excerpt from: Eric de Bruyn, A Film in Five Episodes, in: David Lamelas, Secession, Vienna, 2006, pp. 60-62 (Fifth Episode: London). Reprint with kind permission of Secession Vienna

15

moments, while dropping one scene all together.

The completion of the film cycle is itself indicated by an unexpected act by the woman, who suddenly turns around to directly confront the camera. At this point, the forward movement of time is halted, the gaze of the woman (or is it the camera’s?) is petrified in a static freeze frame.

Film Script is wholly constructed, from what Roland Barthes called “catalyzer” functions.2 These are supplementary types of action, a kind of filler material, that serve to delay or accelerate the pace of the narrative. But catalyzers do not determine the direction of the story, which is key to my argument. The “cardinal” functions, on the other hand, name those decisive moments in a plot where a character is forced to choose between alternative courses of action. The cardinal functions provide the narrative with its destiny, as I said, these are absent in Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning).

The installation confuses the difference between these functions; it mixes their codes.

On several different occasions Lamelas has stated that Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning) actually quotes from the John Schlesinger movie Sunday Bloody Sunday, which was released during the previous year. The exact reference to this movie, however, is not at all that significant.

Lamelas selected a series of shots that in Barthes’ terms were not cardinal, but could serve a catalyzing function in almost any movie. In other words, what is of significance is Lamelas’ structuralist comprehension of cinema as an archive or repository of narrative functions and representational motifs. Just as Lamelas’ previous films played with the organizational rules of the social archive, he would not begin to investigate the syntactical rules of narrative cinema. But this in turn would lead him to consider cinema not just as a timeless, combinatory system of narrative elements, but as a stratified space of popular memory. In order to further clarify this shift to an archival notion of cinema in Lamelas’ work, I shall now turn to another textual reference of Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning), namely Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up.

Antonioni’s movie can be added to the previous examples of cultural dis-location that I have tracked in these pages. Set in London, Blow-up was made by an Italian director, but was based on a text by the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar (Las babas del Diablo) that was located in Paris. Today, such a transnational set of coordinates are a regular 14

aspect of European cinema. In fact, European filmmaking has entered a largely post-national stage since the 1980’s, and references to “national identity” in cinema now operate either as a form of branding (on the global market), or have adopted a highly self-conscious, even ironic character.3 The Light at the Edge of a Nightmare might be taken as perfect example of this post-national condition of cinema. The initial reception of Blow-up, however, was a more complex affair. Antonioni was widely viewed as an exponent of an Italian auteur cinema who could only look at the culture of London from outside, but not feel its inner workings.

The confusion surrounding the Britishness of the movie is striking, since Blow-up was to be about the surface of the media spectacle. While Blow-up intended to portray the new pop scene in London— which in Lamelas’ mind would form a counterfoil to the intellectual milieu of Paris—Antonioni famously stated in an interview that “it was born in London, but it is not an English film.” Apparently, it had not yet been decided in 1966 whether the merging of advertising, art, fashion, and rock-and-roll that is portrayed in Blow-up constituted a strictly local or a more global phenomenon. I would venture, however, that what interested both Antonioni and Lamelas in the cultural scene of London was the manner in which the mass media colluded in its fabrication.

Lest we forget, the main character of Blow-up, Thomas, is a fashion photographer. And while Thomas appears to assume the external, detached position of a voyeur—he masquerades as homeless, for instance, to shoot a social documentary, but his interest in the topic is purely aesthetic—the film gradually reveals that even the identity of Thomas is contingent upon the field of media representation. The movie, as Antonioni states, is about the disturbed relation of this photographer to reality.4 Thomas discovers a murder when he re-examines some photographs he took of a couple in a park, but he is not concerned with solving the crime. (The narratives of film noir have lost their symbolic power.) He seeks the corpse only so he may take its photograph and finish the photographic narrative he began. (Thomas sees and touches the dead body, but fails to take its picture.) In the end, the mistrust of the referential evidence of photography that is instilled within Thomas, will not only undermine his sense of reality, but, by default, disrupt the coherence of the filmic reality that is experienced by the spectator as well. A series of disappearances is set in motion by the movie: first the corpse vanishes, then

the girl disappears, the photographs follow in rapid succession, and ultimately the photographer is wiped off the screen.

What may we conclude from this brief consideration of Antonioni’s film? First of all, Blow-up approaches filmmaking as a kind of structuralist activity. The photographer is engaged in the constructive practice of the assembling of reality, just as the woman in Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning) shuffles through a stack of black and white photographs, or the slide projectors keep reorganizing the filmic sequence.5 Cinema has become aware of itself as a sign system and it now makes conscious use of this property. But this structural self-analysis of the media also undermines our trust in the objective existence of the world. A fundamental phenomenological doubt has set in, since there is no external position, no objective referent against which to check the truth of the image. Or perhaps we need to accept that the truth of the image only resides in its performance? Lamelas proposes in the early seventies that reality is only to be understood as the product of the mass media or, at the very least, that the relation of the image to reality can not always be directly apprehended. Lamelas uses the media in order to critique the media, but he also understands by 1972 that neither the aesthetic of pure information suffices, nor the parodic model of the social survey. This time he will take the power of the media to glamorize the world seriously. The seductiveness of the media spectacle was the lesson to be gained from Blowup—Antonioni’s most commercially successful movie—and he put this lesson to good use in the photographic series of Rock Star (Character Appropriation) (1974). This investigation of the performative conditions of identity within our media society would prefigure much of the theoretical and artistic debates of the 1980’s.

Finally, it is an archival comprehension of cinema that becomes most prominent in Lamelas’ practice after 1972. This archival model of cinema recycles the utopian myths of our past in dissynchrony with our present, as my text has attempted to demonstrate. The mass media have replaced most of our lived memory; they stand guard over our collective practices of commemoration. But this does not mean that the cinematic archive is detached from the material specificities of a social history. While images may be plucked at random from its memory bank, the mythical configurations that cinema has produced over time are tagged to

their respective historical conditions of production. It is this historical trait of the cinematic image, which becomes more and more attenuated in the present, that Lamelas’ latest work ponders. What Lamelas’ filmic practice cannot do, is counter the condition of “anomic fragmentation” (Buchloh’s phrase) that is endemic to the media spectacle. A condition that is equally responsible for the dispersive, episodic structure of my own text. But what Lamelas’ practice can do is work through this dispersive state of the media and remind us of its former utopian potential, of the collective dreams it dreamt, without wanting to recoup this past for the present or, even worse, lapse into an attitude of nostalgia.

Today we can witness any number of archival projects that employ the means of cinema. Many examples from the work of Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe, Stan Douglas, Matthew Buckingham, or Johan Grimonprez come readily to mind.6 But this archival model of filmic practice was preceded in the 1970’s by such artists as David Lamelas and his close friend Marcel Broodthaers. And, of course, by the films of Jean-Luc Godard, who has been glaringly absent in the preceding discussion. When I asked Lamelas why he never mentions Godard as a kind of artistic mentor, he explained to me that this was probably due to the fact that Godard already makes “the same kind of references” that he does. Clearly, the archival method is not about putting into practice what is already familiar to oneself. Or, as Lamelas simply put it: “I had more to learn from Antonioni.”

1. Lamelas in: David Lamelas: A New Refutation of Time, Düsseldorf, 1997, p. 86 2 . Roland Barthes, Introduction to the Structuralist Analysis of Narrative, in: idem, Image-Music-Text, New York, 1977, pp. 79-124 3. See Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Holywood, Amsterdam, 2005 4. Antonioni, Moravia dialoga con Antonioni, in: Daniel Mario Lopez and Alberto Eduardo Ojam (eds.), Antonioni/Cortázar, Blow-up, Buenos Aires, 1968, p. 103 The passage is cited by Seymour Chatman in Antonioni, or The Surface of the World, Berkeley, 1985, p. 141 5 . Jurij Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema, Ann Arbor, 1976, as cited by Seymour Chatman, in Antonioni, or The Surface of the World, Berkeley, 1985, p. 259Berkeley, 1985, p. 141 6 . See Jean-Christophe Royoux, Remaking Cinema, in: Cinéma Cinéma: Contemporary Art and the Cinematic Experience, Eindhoven, 1999, pp. 21-27 and Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, in: October, No. 110, Fall 2004, pp. 3-22 Excerpt from: Eric de Bruyn, A Film in Five Episodes, in: David Lamelas, Secession, Vienna, 2006, pp. 60-62 (Fifth Episode: London). Reprint with kind permission of Secession Vienna

15

*1970 in Watschig, Austria Western, 2002 Single-channel video on monitor 10 min 57 sec, color, sound Artist Proof 1/2, Edition of 5 Das letzte Land, 2005 Alles muss in Flammen stehen Model, crate 122 x 142 x 142 cm Reissbrett Nr. 74, 75, 81, 82 Collages, various sizes Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

*1970 in Watschig, Austria Western, 2002 Single-channel video on monitor 10 min 57 sec, color, sound Artist Proof 1/2, Edition of 5 Das letzte Land, 2005 Alles muss in Flammen stehen Model, crate 122 x 142 x 142 cm Reissbrett Nr. 74, 75, 81, 82 Collages, various sizes Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Mining the Multiply Folded Mountain Franz Xaver Baier

Just as Alexander von Humboldt could not enjoy the freedom of Tenerife’s mountains without remarking that slavery had been abolished on the island, we are unable to perceive a landscape without taking in its emotions and its history. There is an anthropogeographical side to ­geography.1

Reissbrett Nr. 74. Das letzte Land—Bregenzer Wald, 2005

Mountains and landscapes have always been part of a mythical topography. Heaven and hell, life on earth and the hereafter or paradise, for example, are unthinkable without mythology. In the cultures’ internal worlds, mountains, rivers, groves, caves, and grottoes have become Mount Atlas, the multiply terraced mountain of the world, Styx, Acheron, Hades, caves of birth, islands of the blessed, etc. Mount Kailash in Tibet still plays its central part within one of the last archaic advanced civilizations. The mountain is the gods’ throne, the cosmic axis that penetrates all levels of life. It attracts large numbers of pilgrims which hope to find their true self while walking around it: universal sympathy, a deep mental solidarity with all creatures, inner peace, perfect harmony with oneself and the world. The path to this awareness is strewn with rocks and stones, is a route of deceleration, claiming the body completely. If the approach succeeds, the body expands into always larger spaces of time which are continuously updated. All this is also felt and thus interwoven with one’s soul and one’s identity in the most intimate manner. Mountain, scenery, human maturing, and identity are indispensably linked with each other and must not be torn apart by scientification.

Opening up landscapes everywhere, ­tourism, sports, fun, and culture in general mantle the scenery and turn it into an attraction, into magnets and playgrounds. Culture increasingly works as a cover. Though the phrase is open up, immediate experience is of being blocked. Hans

Schabus reverses the order of things: he mantles culture, in the form of a pavilion, with a mountain.

This hints at a primeval landscape, which underlies civilization, a substratum from which civilization springs. Pavilion, architecture, and culture are all stuck in this primeval landscape.

The Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann’s pavilion built for the Biennial of 1934 was conceived as a strictly neoclassicist building. The austere form presents itself as the opposite of a mountain. The mountain towers above this aesthetics with all its rigor and penchant for clear lines and abstraction. It counters the perfection with a provisional structure, with building site architecture, which has room for cheap elements that are more open than the ones that are perfect. The exhibition space which was rather designed for the visual becomes a room to feel, a room for the body, a primeval room, and, perhaps, a sphere beyond all space and time, as corresponds to an archaic and magical structure of life which is rather based on divining and feeling the real world through the body than on knowing and making rational decisions.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze described the generative principle of the Baroque world as an architecture of folds, invaginations, unfoldings, curvatures, etc. He had come upon a theory of folding in Leibniz’s works which concerns a process through which objects and subjects transcend themselves and turn into subjectiles and objectiles—pervaded and supported by an intellectual adventure with a field of experience whose nature may be defined as endless diversity.2 Mountains are bodies, which they transcend though, reaching out into infinity in terms of both time and space. In the present case, the mountain resembles Baroque arrangements of folds, 19

Mining the Multiply Folded Mountain Franz Xaver Baier

Just as Alexander von Humboldt could not enjoy the freedom of Tenerife’s mountains without remarking that slavery had been abolished on the island, we are unable to perceive a landscape without taking in its emotions and its history. There is an anthropogeographical side to ­geography.1

Reissbrett Nr. 74. Das letzte Land—Bregenzer Wald, 2005

Mountains and landscapes have always been part of a mythical topography. Heaven and hell, life on earth and the hereafter or paradise, for example, are unthinkable without mythology. In the cultures’ internal worlds, mountains, rivers, groves, caves, and grottoes have become Mount Atlas, the multiply terraced mountain of the world, Styx, Acheron, Hades, caves of birth, islands of the blessed, etc. Mount Kailash in Tibet still plays its central part within one of the last archaic advanced civilizations. The mountain is the gods’ throne, the cosmic axis that penetrates all levels of life. It attracts large numbers of pilgrims which hope to find their true self while walking around it: universal sympathy, a deep mental solidarity with all creatures, inner peace, perfect harmony with oneself and the world. The path to this awareness is strewn with rocks and stones, is a route of deceleration, claiming the body completely. If the approach succeeds, the body expands into always larger spaces of time which are continuously updated. All this is also felt and thus interwoven with one’s soul and one’s identity in the most intimate manner. Mountain, scenery, human maturing, and identity are indispensably linked with each other and must not be torn apart by scientification.

Opening up landscapes everywhere, ­tourism, sports, fun, and culture in general mantle the scenery and turn it into an attraction, into magnets and playgrounds. Culture increasingly works as a cover. Though the phrase is open up, immediate experience is of being blocked. Hans

Schabus reverses the order of things: he mantles culture, in the form of a pavilion, with a mountain.

This hints at a primeval landscape, which underlies civilization, a substratum from which civilization springs. Pavilion, architecture, and culture are all stuck in this primeval landscape.

The Austrian architect Josef Hoffmann’s pavilion built for the Biennial of 1934 was conceived as a strictly neoclassicist building. The austere form presents itself as the opposite of a mountain. The mountain towers above this aesthetics with all its rigor and penchant for clear lines and abstraction. It counters the perfection with a provisional structure, with building site architecture, which has room for cheap elements that are more open than the ones that are perfect. The exhibition space which was rather designed for the visual becomes a room to feel, a room for the body, a primeval room, and, perhaps, a sphere beyond all space and time, as corresponds to an archaic and magical structure of life which is rather based on divining and feeling the real world through the body than on knowing and making rational decisions.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze described the generative principle of the Baroque world as an architecture of folds, invaginations, unfoldings, curvatures, etc. He had come upon a theory of folding in Leibniz’s works which concerns a process through which objects and subjects transcend themselves and turn into subjectiles and objectiles—pervaded and supported by an intellectual adventure with a field of experience whose nature may be defined as endless diversity.2 Mountains are bodies, which they transcend though, reaching out into infinity in terms of both time and space. In the present case, the mountain resembles Baroque arrangements of folds, 19

which, according to Deleuze and Leibniz respectively, are set into motion and carried along by supernatural winds.

The daily crumpled bed sheets bear evidence of the sleepers’ tossing and turning, their emotional convulsions, of digesting and preparing certain situations of life, of love and sex, and the drama of hidden processes.

Yet, mountains have also an inside: mines, caves, grottoes, the night, the other.

C. G. Jung dreamt of a house with an architecture based on strata of history the age of which increased with their depth and finally rooted in a cave below the basement. In this cave, the dreamer discovers rests of a primitive culture which make him realize the realm of the primitive inside himself which is hardly accessible for his waking consciousness localized on the upper levels.

In times of great esteem, mining had a thoroughly sacral aura. And the Middle Ages saw a theocentric interpretation of mining knowledge and technology. The ores, minerals, and riches of the inner earth documented the magnalia die, the Mighty Acts of God. The sacral culture of mining mainly stems from the miners themselves, and its traces are still evident in the works of Novalis, Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffman, a.o. The cult of the saints and of the Blessed Virgin also reached the world of mining, and old deities such as Hathor-Hecate-Isis, the goddess of the lower spheres and mines, and Path-Hephaistos, the god of the forge, underwent a transformation. While the metallurgic alchemist symbols sun and gold were used for Christ, silver was related to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Saint Ann was regarded as the ore maker: she represents the mind, providing precious metals.

It was customary for a long time that every person that wanted to work in a mine had to be initiated into its mysteries. For mining was not just about the excavation of material but rather about cautious deliveries from the cosmic womb. And whoever wanted to accomplish such a feat had to extinguish himself as a subject before and die an ontological death which transported him to a prenatal state. Thus, man could be born together with the materials in an alchemic manner and advance his maturing.

“Uncomprehended, the structure of the alchemic process of change permeated the scenario of 20

psychoanalysis, the science focusing on the unconscious around 1900. In alchemic medicine, it was taken for granted that all healing processes depend on mustering the courage to journey back to one’s origins —to suffering the little death, that state of dedifferentiation the alchemists call nigredo, blackness. Healing, higher integration, and perfection become possible only through regression and repetition. This is what death of initiation means. Psychoanalysis uses this fundamental alchemic experience as the setting for an everyday therapy: regressing to the genetic roots of their provenance, the patients—under the analyst’s (or initiation master’s) methodical control—resolve their present formation as subjects, dedifferentiate themselves, suffering the nigredo, relive the emotional, sometimes even physical processes of their birth, repeating the drama of microcosmical creation, and—according to the analysts (or alchemist’s promise)—acquire those new energies (new substances) in the workingthrough of this repetition that will enable them to alter their ego structures. The mining stories of Romanticism may be seen as the interface where the passing away of pre-modern mining practice makes the same free for new symbolic uses that constitute the proto-psychoanalytical phase: the history of nature turns into a history of the subject. The mine becomes the arena of the individual.” From now on, the history of the development of mankind relies on connections between mines and the unconscious, mines and memory, rebirthing, mines, and self-discovery. These relations have been inspiring the rather level attitude towards heights and depths until today.3 Related to such motifs as prison, inclusion, weight, burden of the past, paralysis, torture, torment, but also search, curiosity, and orientation, Piranesi was not concerned with perfect real rooms such as those of Palladio in his Carceri. He was interested in spaces of the soul, in psychoarchitecture rather—in rooms the inside and outside of which are not separated but merge in a true-to-life fashion. People primarily live within a permanent space-time fusion and various forms of actuality, such as dream, vision, reality, hyperreality, or unreality, and Piranesi’s pictures have to be regarded as an adequate expression of this fact. His art represents a kind of educational architecture. The little figures wonder about history and learn from it. The rooms are spaces of transition, passages, mental spheres which tend towards proliferating organically. People immerse themselves in the past

Reissbrett Nr. 75. Das letzte Land—Schnitt A, 2005

If there is an access to this mystery at all, it is hermetical, for the secret requires a different kind of consciousness, a rejection of the desire to know and understand everything. We cannot grasp the mystery, it rather grasps us.5

in order to enter the present, to go into the light: “Again and again, the viewer is guided around the supposedly round main room in the back through numerous staircases on endless ways—a room which he may never reach. It is impossible to grasp the building completely. Many of Piranesi’s rooms have no beginning and no end, are cut off by the margins of the picture, and do not invite the viewer to stop and linger but to constantly walk around in them, always looking for something new. They are no mere facts anymore but turn into dynamic structures. The viewer as the tiny only staffage figure contrasting with the monumental character of the room is integrated in the pulsating construct as its explorer, as a traveler through its infinity.”4

1. Cf. Jürgen Hasse, Das Vergessen der menschlichen ­Gefühle in der Anthropogeografie, Geografische Zeitschrift 1999, issue 2 2 . Cf. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, translated from the French by Tom Conley, London, 1993 3. Hartmut Böhme, Geheime Macht im Schoß der Erde, in: Hartmut Böhme, Natur und Subjekt, Frankfurt am Main, 1988 4. Corinna Höper, in: Max Stemshorn and Susanne Grötz (eds.), Vision Piranesi, Tübingen and Berlin 2002, p.46 5 . Cf. Heinrich Rombach, Welt und Gegenwelt, Umdenken über die Wirklichkeit: Die philosophische Hermetik, ­Basel, 1983

The history of Enlightenment is also a history of brightness and of some people’s irresistible urge that everything must “come to light”, “culminate in something”, “reach its peak”. This attitude ignores that all crucial phenomena of life have also a dark side to them, a secret fuelling them.

Revised version of: Franz Xaver Baier, Mining the Multiply Folded Mountain, first published in: Hans Schabus. Das letzte Land. The Last Land. Ed. Max Hollein, La Biennale di Venezia, 2005, pp. 84-91, reprint with kind permission

by Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

21

which, according to Deleuze and Leibniz respectively, are set into motion and carried along by supernatural winds.

The daily crumpled bed sheets bear evidence of the sleepers’ tossing and turning, their emotional convulsions, of digesting and preparing certain situations of life, of love and sex, and the drama of hidden processes.

Yet, mountains have also an inside: mines, caves, grottoes, the night, the other.

C. G. Jung dreamt of a house with an architecture based on strata of history the age of which increased with their depth and finally rooted in a cave below the basement. In this cave, the dreamer discovers rests of a primitive culture which make him realize the realm of the primitive inside himself which is hardly accessible for his waking consciousness localized on the upper levels.

In times of great esteem, mining had a thoroughly sacral aura. And the Middle Ages saw a theocentric interpretation of mining knowledge and technology. The ores, minerals, and riches of the inner earth documented the magnalia die, the Mighty Acts of God. The sacral culture of mining mainly stems from the miners themselves, and its traces are still evident in the works of Novalis, Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffman, a.o. The cult of the saints and of the Blessed Virgin also reached the world of mining, and old deities such as Hathor-Hecate-Isis, the goddess of the lower spheres and mines, and Path-Hephaistos, the god of the forge, underwent a transformation. While the metallurgic alchemist symbols sun and gold were used for Christ, silver was related to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Saint Ann was regarded as the ore maker: she represents the mind, providing precious metals.

It was customary for a long time that every person that wanted to work in a mine had to be initiated into its mysteries. For mining was not just about the excavation of material but rather about cautious deliveries from the cosmic womb. And whoever wanted to accomplish such a feat had to extinguish himself as a subject before and die an ontological death which transported him to a prenatal state. Thus, man could be born together with the materials in an alchemic manner and advance his maturing.

“Uncomprehended, the structure of the alchemic process of change permeated the scenario of 20

psychoanalysis, the science focusing on the unconscious around 1900. In alchemic medicine, it was taken for granted that all healing processes depend on mustering the courage to journey back to one’s origins —to suffering the little death, that state of dedifferentiation the alchemists call nigredo, blackness. Healing, higher integration, and perfection become possible only through regression and repetition. This is what death of initiation means. Psychoanalysis uses this fundamental alchemic experience as the setting for an everyday therapy: regressing to the genetic roots of their provenance, the patients—under the analyst’s (or initiation master’s) methodical control—resolve their present formation as subjects, dedifferentiate themselves, suffering the nigredo, relive the emotional, sometimes even physical processes of their birth, repeating the drama of microcosmical creation, and—according to the analysts (or alchemist’s promise)—acquire those new energies (new substances) in the workingthrough of this repetition that will enable them to alter their ego structures. The mining stories of Romanticism may be seen as the interface where the passing away of pre-modern mining practice makes the same free for new symbolic uses that constitute the proto-psychoanalytical phase: the history of nature turns into a history of the subject. The mine becomes the arena of the individual.” From now on, the history of the development of mankind relies on connections between mines and the unconscious, mines and memory, rebirthing, mines, and self-discovery. These relations have been inspiring the rather level attitude towards heights and depths until today.3 Related to such motifs as prison, inclusion, weight, burden of the past, paralysis, torture, torment, but also search, curiosity, and orientation, Piranesi was not concerned with perfect real rooms such as those of Palladio in his Carceri. He was interested in spaces of the soul, in psychoarchitecture rather—in rooms the inside and outside of which are not separated but merge in a true-to-life fashion. People primarily live within a permanent space-time fusion and various forms of actuality, such as dream, vision, reality, hyperreality, or unreality, and Piranesi’s pictures have to be regarded as an adequate expression of this fact. His art represents a kind of educational architecture. The little figures wonder about history and learn from it. The rooms are spaces of transition, passages, mental spheres which tend towards proliferating organically. People immerse themselves in the past

Reissbrett Nr. 75. Das letzte Land—Schnitt A, 2005

If there is an access to this mystery at all, it is hermetical, for the secret requires a different kind of consciousness, a rejection of the desire to know and understand everything. We cannot grasp the mystery, it rather grasps us.5

in order to enter the present, to go into the light: “Again and again, the viewer is guided around the supposedly round main room in the back through numerous staircases on endless ways—a room which he may never reach. It is impossible to grasp the building completely. Many of Piranesi’s rooms have no beginning and no end, are cut off by the margins of the picture, and do not invite the viewer to stop and linger but to constantly walk around in them, always looking for something new. They are no mere facts anymore but turn into dynamic structures. The viewer as the tiny only staffage figure contrasting with the monumental character of the room is integrated in the pulsating construct as its explorer, as a traveler through its infinity.”4

1. Cf. Jürgen Hasse, Das Vergessen der menschlichen ­Gefühle in der Anthropogeografie, Geografische Zeitschrift 1999, issue 2 2 . Cf. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, translated from the French by Tom Conley, London, 1993 3. Hartmut Böhme, Geheime Macht im Schoß der Erde, in: Hartmut Böhme, Natur und Subjekt, Frankfurt am Main, 1988 4. Corinna Höper, in: Max Stemshorn and Susanne Grötz (eds.), Vision Piranesi, Tübingen and Berlin 2002, p.46 5 . Cf. Heinrich Rombach, Welt und Gegenwelt, Umdenken über die Wirklichkeit: Die philosophische Hermetik, ­Basel, 1983

The history of Enlightenment is also a history of brightness and of some people’s irresistible urge that everything must “come to light”, “culminate in something”, “reach its peak”. This attitude ignores that all crucial phenomena of life have also a dark side to them, a secret fuelling them.

Revised version of: Franz Xaver Baier, Mining the Multiply Folded Mountain, first published in: Hans Schabus. Das letzte Land. The Last Land. Ed. Max Hollein, La Biennale di Venezia, 2005, pp. 84-91, reprint with kind permission

by Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

21

*1975 in Monclova, Coahuila, Mexico Carta Abierta a Dr. Atl (Open Letter to Dr. Atl), 2005 Single-channel video projection (Super 8 Ektachrome film transferred to video) 6 min 30 sec, color, silent Edition 3/5 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

*1975 in Monclova, Coahuila, Mexico Carta Abierta a Dr. Atl (Open Letter to Dr. Atl), 2005 Single-channel video projection (Super 8 Ektachrome film transferred to video) 6 min 30 sec, color, silent Edition 3/5 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Interview with Mario García Torres Gabrielle Cram

Open Letter to Dr. Atl is a fictionalization in which you are writing a letter to the dead painter Gerardo Murillo Dr. Atl (1875–1964) discussing with him the negotiations to install a Guggenheim Museum in the Mexican landscape near the city of Guadalajara. In some sense, this plays with the form of an epistolary enigma, using the very personal and antiquated form of the letter to suggest a rather contested reading of a site.

How would you describe the space/action field that opens up through your artistic strategy?

I have used the epistolary form a few times now—most of the time addressed them to people that are no longer with us. The one I wrote to Dr. Atl was the first one. When I was thinking about how to describe the many and sometimes mixed feelings I had towards the museum issue I thought the epistolary form was the perfect rhetoric form. It was very personal, intimate and strong at the same time. It was distant enough for people who did not know Dr. Atl and for those who knew him. To those who knew who Dr. Atl was, it would become very clear that the text has a rhetoric form and that the text was a strong declaration. And for those that didn’t it would become almost a fictional character that could take the declaration to a more mysterious space.

I really like this space that is opened when you realize that intimacy becomes a strong oppositional statement.

24

What role do the specific sites such as the landscape of the Barranca de Oblatos as well as the envisioned institution play in your work? How would you describe your own artistic space and action radius in relation to your practice in this respect?

I have looked at specific sites in my work, historical sites, most of the time related to conceptual art and Modern Mexican Art. The Guggenheim issue was quite a unique situation that reflected, at that moment, a very honest and immediate preoccupation about the museum plans not being publicly discussed in the terms I envisioned it should be.

Where do you see the potential/challenge lying within blank spaces, (historical) gaps and artistic speculation and how would you describe your interest in those remains of the left-out and erased?

I am interested in talking about something that is not here with us in this moment, and to be able to bring it up to have a new discussion about it.

I think the potential of this spaces that were apparently lost could lead us to think about the way we deal with history but also the way we deal with legitimating actions and artistic gestures nowadays.

25

Interview with Mario García Torres Gabrielle Cram

Open Letter to Dr. Atl is a fictionalization in which you are writing a letter to the dead painter Gerardo Murillo Dr. Atl (1875–1964) discussing with him the negotiations to install a Guggenheim Museum in the Mexican landscape near the city of Guadalajara. In some sense, this plays with the form of an epistolary enigma, using the very personal and antiquated form of the letter to suggest a rather contested reading of a site.

How would you describe the space/action field that opens up through your artistic strategy?

I have used the epistolary form a few times now—most of the time addressed them to people that are no longer with us. The one I wrote to Dr. Atl was the first one. When I was thinking about how to describe the many and sometimes mixed feelings I had towards the museum issue I thought the epistolary form was the perfect rhetoric form. It was very personal, intimate and strong at the same time. It was distant enough for people who did not know Dr. Atl and for those who knew him. To those who knew who Dr. Atl was, it would become very clear that the text has a rhetoric form and that the text was a strong declaration. And for those that didn’t it would become almost a fictional character that could take the declaration to a more mysterious space.

I really like this space that is opened when you realize that intimacy becomes a strong oppositional statement.

24

What role do the specific sites such as the landscape of the Barranca de Oblatos as well as the envisioned institution play in your work? How would you describe your own artistic space and action radius in relation to your practice in this respect?

I have looked at specific sites in my work, historical sites, most of the time related to conceptual art and Modern Mexican Art. The Guggenheim issue was quite a unique situation that reflected, at that moment, a very honest and immediate preoccupation about the museum plans not being publicly discussed in the terms I envisioned it should be.

Where do you see the potential/challenge lying within blank spaces, (historical) gaps and artistic speculation and how would you describe your interest in those remains of the left-out and erased?

I am interested in talking about something that is not here with us in this moment, and to be able to bring it up to have a new discussion about it.

I think the potential of this spaces that were apparently lost could lead us to think about the way we deal with history but also the way we deal with legitimating actions and artistic gestures nowadays.

25

Open Letter to Gerardo Murillo Dr. Atl

Dear Dr. Atl, I wanted to drop you some lines since I have been lately thinking about your paintings. I have been pondering about the way you depicted all those landscapes. And about the significance they could have today. May I ask, what made you select those specific places? While you painted them, did you have in mind they were going to be seen in art galleries and museums? All this came to my mind after I visited the Barranca de Oblatos, in the outskirts of Guadalajara. While there, I found out that this landscape and the art world might soon have a new affair. But before I tell you the story, let me just ask you something more personal; Did you know that one of the viewpoints on the edge of the canyon was named after you?

They say that was one of your favourite places.

Although I am not sure about that. Until today, I haven’t found one single document that actually states so.

During my visit, I made some improvised panning with a Super 8 camera. I thought that a direct representation of the site might still call for attention. Probably it could still trigger some discussions in relation to the use and abuse of landscape in art. You know, how more than ever art is closely related to tourism. People travel long distances to see art. That reminds me of you taking long trips in order to make your paintings.

Someone recently told me to have climbed with you a volcano, The Paricutín. It seems as if the roles of the artist and the museum have switched nowadays. If at some points artists made long journeys in search of extraordinary moments and places, now the museum does the same, but without paying much attention to each place priorities. Let me explain myself.

A few months ago, a North American lady member of the Guggenheim Museum board, passed by the Barranca de Oblatos and was apparently 26

astonished by it. Her trip had as a consequence the idea of constructing a branch of the museum there, one of the viewpoints of the canyon. Can you imagine it? For some time now, the Guggenheim has established branches in different cities in the world. For some time now, the Guggenheim has established in different cities in the world.

The advantage of opening a Guggenheim Museum is that it promises to become a very powerful tool for urging the economic activity of a city. On the surface, everything sounds terrific, but once you start digging in, some specific problems arise.

The establishment of an institution as powerful as this in a country like ours could imply the necessity to make economic and intellectual compromises. When foreign interests are introduced, the autonomy and survival of existent local institutions might be diluted. It is not difficult to differentiate if the opening of a Guggenheim in Guadalajara intends either to play an active role in the country’s cultural discussion or if it only pretends to function as a new destination in the catalogue of international cultural tourism.

But anyway, I shouldn’t spend much time on this with you. You must know how these things work.

There are a few similarities with your unrealised project Olinka, the city of the intellectuals. See, the Barranca de Oblatos seems to be today just as you painted it long time ago. It is still stunning, and that is precisely what has created so much speculation.

Thomas Krens who is the Guggenheim ­museums director recently said that the Barranca de Oblatos is an “instant postcard.” I don’t really know what he meant by that. It is actually hard to imagine. But the truth is that it made me go back to your paintings. The landscape will now be used as a background in different ways, to maximize the aesthetic experience in the museum, and to

promote it as a site. Once the building is up, its image will circulate around the globe. Other cities have also been matter of speculation in the same way, like Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Taichung in Taiwan, where the Guggenheim expansionists’ plans failed. Knowing the impact that a country like Mexico has in the first world cultural imaginary, how do you think the Barranca de Oblatos is imagined from a city like New York? To tell you the truth, I think they actually imagine it farther away than it actually is. You know, I keep asking myself, what could be the real motivation behind visiting the same art collection but this time superimposed to the image of a faraway landscape…

Not long after your death, a new movement in the arts started to get attention. It was a small group of artists, most of them North Americans, which also made art in the landscape, but in a different way than you did. They intervene the land, most of the time in remote and deserted

places. They would then take photos of it and show them in art galleries and museums. Some of them even went to Mexico to do that kind of art works. But anyway, that is another long story that I should better keep for my next letter.

Sincerely confused, Mario García Torres Los Angeles, CA. January 27th, 2005

Transcript from: Mario García Torres, Carta Abierta a Dr. Atl (Open Letter to Dr. Atl), 2005

27

Open Letter to Gerardo Murillo Dr. Atl

Dear Dr. Atl, I wanted to drop you some lines since I have been lately thinking about your paintings. I have been pondering about the way you depicted all those landscapes. And about the significance they could have today. May I ask, what made you select those specific places? While you painted them, did you have in mind they were going to be seen in art galleries and museums? All this came to my mind after I visited the Barranca de Oblatos, in the outskirts of Guadalajara. While there, I found out that this landscape and the art world might soon have a new affair. But before I tell you the story, let me just ask you something more personal; Did you know that one of the viewpoints on the edge of the canyon was named after you?

They say that was one of your favourite places.

Although I am not sure about that. Until today, I haven’t found one single document that actually states so.

During my visit, I made some improvised panning with a Super 8 camera. I thought that a direct representation of the site might still call for attention. Probably it could still trigger some discussions in relation to the use and abuse of landscape in art. You know, how more than ever art is closely related to tourism. People travel long distances to see art. That reminds me of you taking long trips in order to make your paintings.

Someone recently told me to have climbed with you a volcano, The Paricutín. It seems as if the roles of the artist and the museum have switched nowadays. If at some points artists made long journeys in search of extraordinary moments and places, now the museum does the same, but without paying much attention to each place priorities. Let me explain myself.

A few months ago, a North American lady member of the Guggenheim Museum board, passed by the Barranca de Oblatos and was apparently 26

astonished by it. Her trip had as a consequence the idea of constructing a branch of the museum there, one of the viewpoints of the canyon. Can you imagine it? For some time now, the Guggenheim has established branches in different cities in the world. For some time now, the Guggenheim has established in different cities in the world.

The advantage of opening a Guggenheim Museum is that it promises to become a very powerful tool for urging the economic activity of a city. On the surface, everything sounds terrific, but once you start digging in, some specific problems arise.

The establishment of an institution as powerful as this in a country like ours could imply the necessity to make economic and intellectual compromises. When foreign interests are introduced, the autonomy and survival of existent local institutions might be diluted. It is not difficult to differentiate if the opening of a Guggenheim in Guadalajara intends either to play an active role in the country’s cultural discussion or if it only pretends to function as a new destination in the catalogue of international cultural tourism.

But anyway, I shouldn’t spend much time on this with you. You must know how these things work.

There are a few similarities with your unrealised project Olinka, the city of the intellectuals. See, the Barranca de Oblatos seems to be today just as you painted it long time ago. It is still stunning, and that is precisely what has created so much speculation.

Thomas Krens who is the Guggenheim ­museums director recently said that the Barranca de Oblatos is an “instant postcard.” I don’t really know what he meant by that. It is actually hard to imagine. But the truth is that it made me go back to your paintings. The landscape will now be used as a background in different ways, to maximize the aesthetic experience in the museum, and to

promote it as a site. Once the building is up, its image will circulate around the globe. Other cities have also been matter of speculation in the same way, like Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Taichung in Taiwan, where the Guggenheim expansionists’ plans failed. Knowing the impact that a country like Mexico has in the first world cultural imaginary, how do you think the Barranca de Oblatos is imagined from a city like New York? To tell you the truth, I think they actually imagine it farther away than it actually is. You know, I keep asking myself, what could be the real motivation behind visiting the same art collection but this time superimposed to the image of a faraway landscape…

Not long after your death, a new movement in the arts started to get attention. It was a small group of artists, most of them North Americans, which also made art in the landscape, but in a different way than you did. They intervene the land, most of the time in remote and deserted

places. They would then take photos of it and show them in art galleries and museums. Some of them even went to Mexico to do that kind of art works. But anyway, that is another long story that I should better keep for my next letter.

Sincerely confused, Mario García Torres Los Angeles, CA. January 27th, 2005

Transcript from: Mario García Torres, Carta Abierta a Dr. Atl (Open Letter to Dr. Atl), 2005

27

*1950 in Haifa, Israel House (Bait), 1980 16 mm film (transferred to DVD) 51 min, b/w, sound A House in Jerusalem (Bait be Yerushalayim), 1998 35 mm film (transferred to DVD) 87 min, color, sound News from Home / News from House, 2005 Video 97 min, color, sound Courtesy of the artist and Cinephil

*1950 in Haifa, Israel House (Bait), 1980 16 mm film (transferred to DVD) 51 min, b/w, sound A House in Jerusalem (Bait be Yerushalayim), 1998 35 mm film (transferred to DVD) 87 min, color, sound News from Home / News from House, 2005 Video 97 min, color, sound Courtesy of the artist and Cinephil

Filmstills from House (Bait), 1980

Amos Gitai The House Trilogy

It was in the early 80s that Amos Gitai presented owner of the house with the Arab laborers one of his first films at the Berlin Festival, the recruited from the occupied territories to rebuild documentary House (Bait). In the 25 years which and expand it. He also interviews its pre-1948 passed since then, Amos Gitai has become one owner, Mr. Dejani, who says at the end of the of the most influential Israeli filmmakers ever, film, in front of the house where he was born “To whose rich body of work is characterized by his see something that is yours but to be unable to continous cultural and political engagement in go inside, words cannot describe it.” At that time, finding possible ways of understanding across the Israeli TV refused to show the film, and Gitai has frontiers of the Israeli/Palestinian-conflict and only a video copy. In 1982, legendary french film the artistic exploration of the cultural meanings critic Sèrge Daney writes: and personal implications of exile and diaspora.

“Gitai wants this house to be both a symbol and something very concrete; he wants it to become a character in a film.

House is a story of a particular building in JeHe achieves one of the most beautiful things a camera can rusalem which was abandoned during the 1948 record live, as it were; people who look at the same thing war by its owner, a Palestinian doctor; requiand see different things—and who are moved by that vision.

In this crumbling shell of a house real hallucinations begin sitioned by the Israeli government as vacant; to take shape.“ (Sèrge Daney)* rented to Jewish Algerian immigrants in 1956; and purchased by a university professor who Eighteen years after House, Amos Gitai returned undertakes its transformation into a patrician to the setting of his first film to observe the villa. Amos Gitai, whose father is the renowned changes in the new residents as well as in the Bauhaus Architect Munio Weintraub-Gitai and neighborhood. In the resulting sequel called A who himself is trained as an architect, places House in Jerusalem, Gitai interviews the family of this house at the centre of the world, conceptuthe Jew who owned the house in the earlier work ally following the words of theoreticians such as and the last Arab family to have owned it, focusGaston Bachelard and J. Douglas Porteous, who ing on moderates who assert the common hudescribe the house in general as “our corner of manity of both sides and panning over homes and the world… our first universe, a real cosmos in landscapes to remind us of their human signifievery sense of the word” or “the territorial core cance. Since 1998, Gitai has continously followed and fixed point of reference,” while at the same both the Arab and Jewish families connected to time pointing towards the often negelected prior- the house. With News from Home / News from ity of territorial questions over ideology in the House, Gitai completes the trilogy. Creating a conflict. The house turns into a narrative device sort of human archeology, the filmmaker explores and a theatre stage, in which the former inhabitthe relationships between the inhabitants of the ants, the neighbors, the workers, the builder and house. Each individual becomes a sign hinting at the new owner all appear. While underlining the a certain story or history, which meet together in unstable situation of the Israelis who came to these three films as the private destinies of the occupy this part of Jerusalem the constant in the house’s successive inhabitants trace the loops of film is the suffering of the expropriated Palestinthe Palestinian and Israeli history. ian family. Gitai points as well towards the country’s colonial attitudes by intercutting the present * Sèrge Daney, Libération, March 1, 1982 31

Filmstills from House (Bait), 1980

Amos Gitai The House Trilogy

It was in the early 80s that Amos Gitai presented owner of the house with the Arab laborers one of his first films at the Berlin Festival, the recruited from the occupied territories to rebuild documentary House (Bait). In the 25 years which and expand it. He also interviews its pre-1948 passed since then, Amos Gitai has become one owner, Mr. Dejani, who says at the end of the of the most influential Israeli filmmakers ever, film, in front of the house where he was born “To whose rich body of work is characterized by his see something that is yours but to be unable to continous cultural and political engagement in go inside, words cannot describe it.” At that time, finding possible ways of understanding across the Israeli TV refused to show the film, and Gitai has frontiers of the Israeli/Palestinian-conflict and only a video copy. In 1982, legendary french film the artistic exploration of the cultural meanings critic Sèrge Daney writes: and personal implications of exile and diaspora.

“Gitai wants this house to be both a symbol and something very concrete; he wants it to become a character in a film.

House is a story of a particular building in JeHe achieves one of the most beautiful things a camera can rusalem which was abandoned during the 1948 record live, as it were; people who look at the same thing war by its owner, a Palestinian doctor; requiand see different things—and who are moved by that vision.

In this crumbling shell of a house real hallucinations begin sitioned by the Israeli government as vacant; to take shape.“ (Sèrge Daney)* rented to Jewish Algerian immigrants in 1956; and purchased by a university professor who Eighteen years after House, Amos Gitai returned undertakes its transformation into a patrician to the setting of his first film to observe the villa. Amos Gitai, whose father is the renowned changes in the new residents as well as in the Bauhaus Architect Munio Weintraub-Gitai and neighborhood. In the resulting sequel called A who himself is trained as an architect, places House in Jerusalem, Gitai interviews the family of this house at the centre of the world, conceptuthe Jew who owned the house in the earlier work ally following the words of theoreticians such as and the last Arab family to have owned it, focusGaston Bachelard and J. Douglas Porteous, who ing on moderates who assert the common hudescribe the house in general as “our corner of manity of both sides and panning over homes and the world… our first universe, a real cosmos in landscapes to remind us of their human signifievery sense of the word” or “the territorial core cance. Since 1998, Gitai has continously followed and fixed point of reference,” while at the same both the Arab and Jewish families connected to time pointing towards the often negelected prior- the house. With News from Home / News from ity of territorial questions over ideology in the House, Gitai completes the trilogy. Creating a conflict. The house turns into a narrative device sort of human archeology, the filmmaker explores and a theatre stage, in which the former inhabitthe relationships between the inhabitants of the ants, the neighbors, the workers, the builder and house. Each individual becomes a sign hinting at the new owner all appear. While underlining the a certain story or history, which meet together in unstable situation of the Israelis who came to these three films as the private destinies of the occupy this part of Jerusalem the constant in the house’s successive inhabitants trace the loops of film is the suffering of the expropriated Palestinthe Palestinian and Israeli history. ian family. Gitai points as well towards the country’s colonial attitudes by intercutting the present * Sèrge Daney, Libération, March 1, 1982 31

Filmstills from A House in Jerusalem (Bait be Yerushalayim), 1998

House, a short 51-minute documentary film in black and white, is one of the great works of cinematographic art, and whatever the technology that was used to shoot it, Gitai regards it with good reason as the starting-point of his work as a filmdirector.

Landing up in a place that simultaneously condenses so many issues, approaches, symbolic and metaphorical devices, all functioning in so many different ways (politically, historically, mythologically, emotionally …) can always be ascribed to chance; they all remain perfectly legible and sometimes retain a simplicity that is quite extraordinary. No. 14, Dor Dor Vedorshav street (the street name itself is deeply enigmatic), that building site where Palestinian stonemasons work under the command of an Israeli entrepreneur, is the address of the house where an Israeli economist, the second owner, grew up, after a couple who came from Algeria in 1956, a house which once belonged to an important Palestinian family in Jerusalem, the Dejanis.

Gitai the architect is naturally passionate about this metaphor built from the country’s history, but Gitai the film director has no illusions about his work: here it is less important to construct a film than to dig beneath surface appearances, raw facts and over-obvious symbols. The important thing is to look and to listen. There is no luck involved in the power of evocation and of comprehension conveyed by House and its inhabitants (the inhabitants of the film, very few of whom inhabit the house), but instead a precise and thoroughly-reflected selectivity, as well as something else: the grace of documentary cinema.

There is nothing fortuitous about this grace, it is the preserve of the great directors, those with a sense of vision and length, whose relationship with the world patiently and invisibly constructs the conditions of appearances. From something beyond the visible that is the reason cinema exists, and documentaries too. Visible from the opening sequence onwards, this exceptional grace hardly ever deserts this modestly-made film, in which everything suddenly makes sense on several different levels without ever losing immediate contact with the subject matter and with humanity. The clearest proof of this inexplicable process is the extraordinary beauty of each person who appears in the film. This beauty is not there at the outset, but generated by the actual filming itself. The beautiful characters are young

or old, Jewish or Arabic, rich or poor, covered with dust or dressed in chic suits and carrying canes. They are workers, bosses, intellectuals and small-time businessmen. Everyone—the old Jew from Algeria with his little hat, the stonemason who does not want to mention his name, the immigrant entrepreneur from Iraq, the professor of economics, the old doctor Dejani … They all conquer their own appearance, which does them justice because they are filmed with justice.

No “all the world is beautiful” here. Here we have a trenchant exploration of meaning that is not afraid to tell the brutal truth (“of course we feel hatred” says the Palestinian worker quietly, explaining that the hatred is something the occupier wants, and that he and his companions feel like prisoners). What House gives us is the dislocation of the history as it is lived and perceived. Through the words of each person, and without any grand phrases, he conveys the Jews’ feeling of victory, or liberation, of happiness and security, of being in harmony with their origins, their present and their future, individually and collectively; and also the perception that is intimate and hard to formulate, yet omnipresent, of a defeat, an oppression, a misfortune and an uncertainty, of a rupture that has occurred and that is weighing heavily on the future—individually and collectively—of the Palestinians. These two representations of the world are not symmetrical, because the Jews who speak do not feel that their victory was won over an Arab adversary but over a thousand-year-old curse, over Hitler, and over the anti-Semites. They know the History of the creation of Israel, but make use of it differently from the Palestinians; they do not place it at the same level of importance. Whether they mention it or remain silent about it in a very audible manner, the Palestinians see those who live in East Jerusalem—those who run companies or go out on manoeuvres—as being directly responsible for their fate. It is this asymmetry that is the true political device of this film—because knowing something is one thing, but experiencing it as the film progresses and sensing the powerful echoes it leaves behind is something infinitely more profound.

Excerpt from: Jean-Michel Frodon, 2 x 3 x Gitai, pp. 123165, in: Amos Gitai. News from Home, ed. Filmfestspiele Berlin, Cologne, 2006, pp. 152-154

33

Filmstills from A House in Jerusalem (Bait be Yerushalayim), 1998

House, a short 51-minute documentary film in black and white, is one of the great works of cinematographic art, and whatever the technology that was used to shoot it, Gitai regards it with good reason as the starting-point of his work as a filmdirector.

Landing up in a place that simultaneously condenses so many issues, approaches, symbolic and metaphorical devices, all functioning in so many different ways (politically, historically, mythologically, emotionally …) can always be ascribed to chance; they all remain perfectly legible and sometimes retain a simplicity that is quite extraordinary. No. 14, Dor Dor Vedorshav street (the street name itself is deeply enigmatic), that building site where Palestinian stonemasons work under the command of an Israeli entrepreneur, is the address of the house where an Israeli economist, the second owner, grew up, after a couple who came from Algeria in 1956, a house which once belonged to an important Palestinian family in Jerusalem, the Dejanis.

Gitai the architect is naturally passionate about this metaphor built from the country’s history, but Gitai the film director has no illusions about his work: here it is less important to construct a film than to dig beneath surface appearances, raw facts and over-obvious symbols. The important thing is to look and to listen. There is no luck involved in the power of evocation and of comprehension conveyed by House and its inhabitants (the inhabitants of the film, very few of whom inhabit the house), but instead a precise and thoroughly-reflected selectivity, as well as something else: the grace of documentary cinema.

There is nothing fortuitous about this grace, it is the preserve of the great directors, those with a sense of vision and length, whose relationship with the world patiently and invisibly constructs the conditions of appearances. From something beyond the visible that is the reason cinema exists, and documentaries too. Visible from the opening sequence onwards, this exceptional grace hardly ever deserts this modestly-made film, in which everything suddenly makes sense on several different levels without ever losing immediate contact with the subject matter and with humanity. The clearest proof of this inexplicable process is the extraordinary beauty of each person who appears in the film. This beauty is not there at the outset, but generated by the actual filming itself. The beautiful characters are young

or old, Jewish or Arabic, rich or poor, covered with dust or dressed in chic suits and carrying canes. They are workers, bosses, intellectuals and small-time businessmen. Everyone—the old Jew from Algeria with his little hat, the stonemason who does not want to mention his name, the immigrant entrepreneur from Iraq, the professor of economics, the old doctor Dejani … They all conquer their own appearance, which does them justice because they are filmed with justice.

No “all the world is beautiful” here. Here we have a trenchant exploration of meaning that is not afraid to tell the brutal truth (“of course we feel hatred” says the Palestinian worker quietly, explaining that the hatred is something the occupier wants, and that he and his companions feel like prisoners). What House gives us is the dislocation of the history as it is lived and perceived. Through the words of each person, and without any grand phrases, he conveys the Jews’ feeling of victory, or liberation, of happiness and security, of being in harmony with their origins, their present and their future, individually and collectively; and also the perception that is intimate and hard to formulate, yet omnipresent, of a defeat, an oppression, a misfortune and an uncertainty, of a rupture that has occurred and that is weighing heavily on the future—individually and collectively—of the Palestinians. These two representations of the world are not symmetrical, because the Jews who speak do not feel that their victory was won over an Arab adversary but over a thousand-year-old curse, over Hitler, and over the anti-Semites. They know the History of the creation of Israel, but make use of it differently from the Palestinians; they do not place it at the same level of importance. Whether they mention it or remain silent about it in a very audible manner, the Palestinians see those who live in East Jerusalem—those who run companies or go out on manoeuvres—as being directly responsible for their fate. It is this asymmetry that is the true political device of this film—because knowing something is one thing, but experiencing it as the film progresses and sensing the powerful echoes it leaves behind is something infinitely more profound.

Excerpt from: Jean-Michel Frodon, 2 x 3 x Gitai, pp. 123165, in: Amos Gitai. News from Home, ed. Filmfestspiele Berlin, Cologne, 2006, pp. 152-154

33

Filmstills from News from Home / News from House, 2005

35

Filmstills from News from Home / News from House, 2005

35

*1972 in Ryki, Poland M10, 2004 MDF, wallpaper, carpet, pendant lights 240 x 500 x 500 cm Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

*1972 in Ryki, Poland M10, 2004 MDF, wallpaper, carpet, pendant lights 240 x 500 x 500 cm Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

Endless Unfolding of (Spatial) Durée Adam Budak

“Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts.” (Andy Warhol)1 “Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.”

(Georges Perec)2

In her installations that echo the formal language of constructivist avant-garde, minimal and conceptual tendencies of the 60s and the 70s as well as a heritage of modernist architecture, Monika Sosnowska constructs a physical and conceptual labyrinth, a post-narrative, inner world of spatiality, staged in a sequence of interventions that emphasize space’s virtualities and potentials.

Here, in this complex and powerful investigation of a spatial perception, a particular surgery is being applied to a body of space and its cultural articulation, architecture. The space and its parameters: size, dimensions, scale, plans, topology are being altered, shifted and possibly confused and manipulated in order to generate a very unique, unusual experience of spatial habitat and to sharpen our perception of it, outside of a common reality and its habits. With her intimate geometry, Sosnowska experiments with our senses and emotions, making us aware of psychosomatic, hidden qualities of space which in her highly performative installations are personified and animated. Between Kafkaesque oppression and a desire to liberate space, there is a sublime and uncanny spatial environment, rendered—often very playfully—on the edge of dream-like imagery and an everyday familiar experience.

Loop, 2007 Installation at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 2007

Oscillating between non-regularity and deformation, dysfunction and architectural abuse, Sosnowska challenges formal aspects and emotional intensity of spaces and spatial environments.

Multiplying and proliferating spaces, her work performs a struggle with a certain precisely defined system of architecture (its geometric variables, but also social objectives and site conditions). Possibly perceived as an attempt to escape, as if, architecture and its imprisonment in function and functionality, her work employs

an extended vocabulary of spatial surgeries that mainly belong to a catalogue of architectural and constructive misfortunes: a failure, a trap, a parasite, a ruin…

Corridor Constructing Loop-ed corridor as an endless site of passage, Sosnowska positions the spectator within the constant moment of entering: Loop takes on a sort of before-place status and it does contribute to an on-going act of becoming (the proper place). We are permanently at the threshold, within the area of partial identity in transition, never fully inside while the access is suspended or denied by the blurred border between inside and outside and the spectator’s expectations and his/her own habits being permanently tested. The spectator is trapped within a waiting room: Loop is a focused space of limited temporality, an area of circulation which offers trajectories to negotiate personal and communal identities. Such is Sosnowska’s personal version of psychogeography: non-static active apparatus which imprisons senses within a corporeal experience of imposed movement— an act of disoriented walking, derive and flanerie reconsidered and exposed to a precariousness of chance, temporariness and illusion of presumably unlimited choices.

Thus generated spatial environment becomes a site of unconscious. Loop is a cut and a negative. As a product of particular introjection and incorporation, unhomely and uncanny at its core, it marks a search for a proper place (of a history, a childhood, a present moment too). Between intimacy and radical exposure, memory and its shades, remembrance and recollection are activated. Dream and possibly its nightmare-like 39

Endless Unfolding of (Spatial) Durée Adam Budak

“Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its spaces into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts.” (Andy Warhol)1 “Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.”

(Georges Perec)2

In her installations that echo the formal language of constructivist avant-garde, minimal and conceptual tendencies of the 60s and the 70s as well as a heritage of modernist architecture, Monika Sosnowska constructs a physical and conceptual labyrinth, a post-narrative, inner world of spatiality, staged in a sequence of interventions that emphasize space’s virtualities and potentials.

Here, in this complex and powerful investigation of a spatial perception, a particular surgery is being applied to a body of space and its cultural articulation, architecture. The space and its parameters: size, dimensions, scale, plans, topology are being altered, shifted and possibly confused and manipulated in order to generate a very unique, unusual experience of spatial habitat and to sharpen our perception of it, outside of a common reality and its habits. With her intimate geometry, Sosnowska experiments with our senses and emotions, making us aware of psychosomatic, hidden qualities of space which in her highly performative installations are personified and animated. Between Kafkaesque oppression and a desire to liberate space, there is a sublime and uncanny spatial environment, rendered—often very playfully—on the edge of dream-like imagery and an everyday familiar experience.

Loop, 2007 Installation at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 2007

Oscillating between non-regularity and deformation, dysfunction and architectural abuse, Sosnowska challenges formal aspects and emotional intensity of spaces and spatial environments.

Multiplying and proliferating spaces, her work performs a struggle with a certain precisely defined system of architecture (its geometric variables, but also social objectives and site conditions). Possibly perceived as an attempt to escape, as if, architecture and its imprisonment in function and functionality, her work employs

an extended vocabulary of spatial surgeries that mainly belong to a catalogue of architectural and constructive misfortunes: a failure, a trap, a parasite, a ruin…

Corridor Constructing Loop-ed corridor as an endless site of passage, Sosnowska positions the spectator within the constant moment of entering: Loop takes on a sort of before-place status and it does contribute to an on-going act of becoming (the proper place). We are permanently at the threshold, within the area of partial identity in transition, never fully inside while the access is suspended or denied by the blurred border between inside and outside and the spectator’s expectations and his/her own habits being permanently tested. The spectator is trapped within a waiting room: Loop is a focused space of limited temporality, an area of circulation which offers trajectories to negotiate personal and communal identities. Such is Sosnowska’s personal version of psychogeography: non-static active apparatus which imprisons senses within a corporeal experience of imposed movement— an act of disoriented walking, derive and flanerie reconsidered and exposed to a precariousness of chance, temporariness and illusion of presumably unlimited choices.

Thus generated spatial environment becomes a site of unconscious. Loop is a cut and a negative. As a product of particular introjection and incorporation, unhomely and uncanny at its core, it marks a search for a proper place (of a history, a childhood, a present moment too). Between intimacy and radical exposure, memory and its shades, remembrance and recollection are activated. Dream and possibly its nightmare-like 39

v­ ersion, contribute to this spatial excess, challenging monumentality, dimensionality and a flexibility of a scale as if operating within a realm of unlimited imagination and fantasy.

Endless Experiencing the work of Monika Sosnowska, the spectator enters the territories of the sublime, or rather a “phenomenology of the sublime” where certain carefully studied manipulation of space but also of time occurs. Pamela M. Lee introduces this term while approaching Gordon MattaClark’s rhetoric of violence towards sculptural practice and urban space3. Phenomenology of the sublime combines two seemingly opposite desires: a cognitive embrace of sensory perception and consequently an elevation of the phenomenal world to the status of philosophical principle—on the one hand, and on the other—the sublime as a failure of the mind to comprehend an excess of sensible phenomena, thus generating an ambiguous feeling of simultaneously experienced pleasure and the pain for the subject. ­Sosnowska shares a degree of radicalism to which MattaClark transforms destabilizing spaces into phenomenal objects. Here too, the scale and dimensionality are at stake, as tools that help to build a passage between the sublime and the phenomenological, thus engendering the thrill of the unknown and the endless. Pamela M. Lee turns attention to a degree of contingency which for Matta-Clark is a priori about a certain mode of cognitive excess, which cannot be totalized because it is endlessly conditional: it reveals that our experience as contingent beings guarantees that we are always already subjected to a state of perpetual vertigo4. Echoing both, a cut and a split, Sosnowska’s transgressive practice corresponds with such readings of sublime and phenomenological, while testing the limits of (cognitive and sensory) experience itself in a radical act of being devoured and assimilated by the spatial and the temporal: here, Merleau-Ponty’s quality of “everywhereness” and Cavell’s “total thereness” shake up the relationship between reason and imagination, producing an overwhelming and excessive feeling of defamiliarization and uncanniness. Such totalizing perceptual experience—a subversive gesture in itself—conditions an economy of spectatorship, bracketing apprehension and comprehension, and suspending a judgment, on the edge of legibility…

40

A Parasite Monika Sosnowska’s Loop as an architectural and spatial construction might be perceived as a field where psychoanalytical mechanisms of introjection (as a regular process of love and mourning) and incorporation (as instantaneous and hallucinogenic process which marks the refusal to mourn or love) operate, leading towards production of an architectonics of crypt—a particular split of Ego and Id, which while destabilizing the subject, constitutes the very possibility of it. Raised by the force of a traumatic event, it does occupy the ambiguous space of passage, of an in-between, as a cyst in a fold of a body’s limit, hidden in a space which is neither inside nor outside, amorphic no-place within place, closed-off, hiding the forbidden object, the swallowed and lost memory and a trace of ineffable pleasure and idyll. Loop is such a case study of incorporation: taking in, appropriating inside, inside within me. Thus constructed space—interiority in itself—becomes an autonomous and dynamic terrain of potentiality, and as such it relates to the figure of parasite and the entire—­simultaneously constructive and subversive—parasitical economy which seems to play important role in how the installations of Monika Sosnowska function within a given site and its context. Loop’s elliptical hallway bears logic of a parasite, a foreigner (or uninvited guest) which colonizes the (domestic or institutional) interior and unable to be removed from it, by being thrown up and out, without ruining the space. For Mark Wigley who is rereading Derrida, this hidden logic of the domestic is tacitly understood as a haunting of the house: “The uncanniness of the parasite is that it is never simply alien to and separable from the body to which it has been transplanted or which it already haunts. The space is haunted by that which exceeds it: the para-site, that which is supplementary (para) to the site. The house, as a paradigm of place, is haunted by that which disrupts place but cannot be expelled from it. The parasite’s uncanny quasi occupation of the house is seen to displace its law by disturbing the logic of place.”5 The parasite appears as a figure of excess, located neither inside nor outside, but never simply external, neither included nor excluded… Derrida describes parasitism as a performance of suspended occupation: “it takes place when the parasite comes to live off the life of the body in which it resides—and when, reciprocally, the host incorporates the parasite to an extent, willy nilly offering it

M10, 2004

Model for M10

hospitality by providing it with a place. The parasite Robbe-Grillet’s objective literature of memory’s then takes place. And, at bottom, whatever violently hide-and-seek. Italo Calvino’s (almost detective) takes place or occupies a site is always something novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) is a of a parasite. Never quite taking place is thus part particular study of “corporeal” reading, an open of its performance, of its success as an event, of trajectory of potentialities, a set of instructions but its taking place.”6 Sosnowska’s installations, and also a looped cycle of identity’s confusion which Loop in particular, “take place” in a truly parasitic describes an (endless) journey of self-referential sense—haunting the host-site and at once installnature, functioning as a metaphor for an act of ing and subverting the logic of place. Possessive in reading itself, a permanent continuous discovery of themselves, with no legitimate place within the octhe plot, the author and the creation system. Here, cupied system, they transgress a familiar environimmersed in a constant doubting and restless ment, rendering a (sometimes disturbing) sensaquestioning of the artistic process, an art work tion of strangeness and alienation, disrupting the operates as a hypothesis which leaves the spectatraditional sense of being at home, never quite tor/reader with seemingly unconditional choice of there… Such is Sosnowska’s politics of belonging routes and narratives. In her Loop, Monika Sosand troublesome co-habitation—between to take nowska offers a similar possibility to travel through part and to take apart, a seemingly deconstructive the inner architectures of a (hypertextual) mind logic of a parasite, engaged in both, destructuring towards endlessly redefined subjectivity. I hope that dismantles the structural layers in the system you will all enjoy this uncanny and unusual journey. and deinstalling in order to see how the structure “You are about to begin reading…”7 Bon Voyage! is constituted.

If on a Winter’s Night…

Although Monika Sosnowska claims a disinterest for a narrative in her work, there are a number of literary associations that immediately come to mind while experiencing her spatial environments, the literary tropes that belong to a canon of metaphors of our collective consciousness thus creating a certain specific meta-narrative—from Borges’s labyrinthine structures, gardens of forking paths and circular ruins, through Kafka’s psychotic interiors and alien transformations and Lewis Carroll’s experiments with scale and dimensions to Allain

1. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. From A to B and Back Again, New York, 1975, p. 143 2. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Books, 1999, p. 91 3. Lee M. Pamela, Object to Be Destroyed. The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, The MIT Press, 2000, p. 118 4. Lee M. Pamela, op. cit., 160 5 . Wigley, Mark, Derrida’s Haunt. The Architecture of ­Deconstruction, The MIT Press, 1997, p. 180 6 . Derrida, Jacques, quoted in: Wigley, Mark, op. cit., p.180 5. Calvino, Italo, If on a winter’s night a traveler, A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1979, p. 3 7. Calvino, Italo, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Harvest/ HBJ Book, 1979, p. 3 Revised version of: Adam Budak, Endless Unfolding of (Spatial) Durée, first published in: Monika Sosnowska, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Cologne, 2007, pp. 32-41

41

v­ ersion, contribute to this spatial excess, challenging monumentality, dimensionality and a flexibility of a scale as if operating within a realm of unlimited imagination and fantasy.

Endless Experiencing the work of Monika Sosnowska, the spectator enters the territories of the sublime, or rather a “phenomenology of the sublime” where certain carefully studied manipulation of space but also of time occurs. Pamela M. Lee introduces this term while approaching Gordon MattaClark’s rhetoric of violence towards sculptural practice and urban space3. Phenomenology of the sublime combines two seemingly opposite desires: a cognitive embrace of sensory perception and consequently an elevation of the phenomenal world to the status of philosophical principle—on the one hand, and on the other—the sublime as a failure of the mind to comprehend an excess of sensible phenomena, thus generating an ambiguous feeling of simultaneously experienced pleasure and the pain for the subject. ­Sosnowska shares a degree of radicalism to which MattaClark transforms destabilizing spaces into phenomenal objects. Here too, the scale and dimensionality are at stake, as tools that help to build a passage between the sublime and the phenomenological, thus engendering the thrill of the unknown and the endless. Pamela M. Lee turns attention to a degree of contingency which for Matta-Clark is a priori about a certain mode of cognitive excess, which cannot be totalized because it is endlessly conditional: it reveals that our experience as contingent beings guarantees that we are always already subjected to a state of perpetual vertigo4. Echoing both, a cut and a split, Sosnowska’s transgressive practice corresponds with such readings of sublime and phenomenological, while testing the limits of (cognitive and sensory) experience itself in a radical act of being devoured and assimilated by the spatial and the temporal: here, Merleau-Ponty’s quality of “everywhereness” and Cavell’s “total thereness” shake up the relationship between reason and imagination, producing an overwhelming and excessive feeling of defamiliarization and uncanniness. Such totalizing perceptual experience—a subversive gesture in itself—conditions an economy of spectatorship, bracketing apprehension and comprehension, and suspending a judgment, on the edge of legibility…

40

A Parasite Monika Sosnowska’s Loop as an architectural and spatial construction might be perceived as a field where psychoanalytical mechanisms of introjection (as a regular process of love and mourning) and incorporation (as instantaneous and hallucinogenic process which marks the refusal to mourn or love) operate, leading towards production of an architectonics of crypt—a particular split of Ego and Id, which while destabilizing the subject, constitutes the very possibility of it. Raised by the force of a traumatic event, it does occupy the ambiguous space of passage, of an in-between, as a cyst in a fold of a body’s limit, hidden in a space which is neither inside nor outside, amorphic no-place within place, closed-off, hiding the forbidden object, the swallowed and lost memory and a trace of ineffable pleasure and idyll. Loop is such a case study of incorporation: taking in, appropriating inside, inside within me. Thus constructed space—interiority in itself—becomes an autonomous and dynamic terrain of potentiality, and as such it relates to the figure of parasite and the entire—­simultaneously constructive and subversive—parasitical economy which seems to play important role in how the installations of Monika Sosnowska function within a given site and its context. Loop’s elliptical hallway bears logic of a parasite, a foreigner (or uninvited guest) which colonizes the (domestic or institutional) interior and unable to be removed from it, by being thrown up and out, without ruining the space. For Mark Wigley who is rereading Derrida, this hidden logic of the domestic is tacitly understood as a haunting of the house: “The uncanniness of the parasite is that it is never simply alien to and separable from the body to which it has been transplanted or which it already haunts. The space is haunted by that which exceeds it: the para-site, that which is supplementary (para) to the site. The house, as a paradigm of place, is haunted by that which disrupts place but cannot be expelled from it. The parasite’s uncanny quasi occupation of the house is seen to displace its law by disturbing the logic of place.”5 The parasite appears as a figure of excess, located neither inside nor outside, but never simply external, neither included nor excluded… Derrida describes parasitism as a performance of suspended occupation: “it takes place when the parasite comes to live off the life of the body in which it resides—and when, reciprocally, the host incorporates the parasite to an extent, willy nilly offering it

M10, 2004

Model for M10

hospitality by providing it with a place. The parasite Robbe-Grillet’s objective literature of memory’s then takes place. And, at bottom, whatever violently hide-and-seek. Italo Calvino’s (almost detective) takes place or occupies a site is always something novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979) is a of a parasite. Never quite taking place is thus part particular study of “corporeal” reading, an open of its performance, of its success as an event, of trajectory of potentialities, a set of instructions but its taking place.”6 Sosnowska’s installations, and also a looped cycle of identity’s confusion which Loop in particular, “take place” in a truly parasitic describes an (endless) journey of self-referential sense—haunting the host-site and at once installnature, functioning as a metaphor for an act of ing and subverting the logic of place. Possessive in reading itself, a permanent continuous discovery of themselves, with no legitimate place within the octhe plot, the author and the creation system. Here, cupied system, they transgress a familiar environimmersed in a constant doubting and restless ment, rendering a (sometimes disturbing) sensaquestioning of the artistic process, an art work tion of strangeness and alienation, disrupting the operates as a hypothesis which leaves the spectatraditional sense of being at home, never quite tor/reader with seemingly unconditional choice of there… Such is Sosnowska’s politics of belonging routes and narratives. In her Loop, Monika Sosand troublesome co-habitation—between to take nowska offers a similar possibility to travel through part and to take apart, a seemingly deconstructive the inner architectures of a (hypertextual) mind logic of a parasite, engaged in both, destructuring towards endlessly redefined subjectivity. I hope that dismantles the structural layers in the system you will all enjoy this uncanny and unusual journey. and deinstalling in order to see how the structure “You are about to begin reading…”7 Bon Voyage! is constituted.

If on a Winter’s Night…

Although Monika Sosnowska claims a disinterest for a narrative in her work, there are a number of literary associations that immediately come to mind while experiencing her spatial environments, the literary tropes that belong to a canon of metaphors of our collective consciousness thus creating a certain specific meta-narrative—from Borges’s labyrinthine structures, gardens of forking paths and circular ruins, through Kafka’s psychotic interiors and alien transformations and Lewis Carroll’s experiments with scale and dimensions to Allain

1. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. From A to B and Back Again, New York, 1975, p. 143 2. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin Books, 1999, p. 91 3. Lee M. Pamela, Object to Be Destroyed. The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, The MIT Press, 2000, p. 118 4. Lee M. Pamela, op. cit., 160 5 . Wigley, Mark, Derrida’s Haunt. The Architecture of ­Deconstruction, The MIT Press, 1997, p. 180 6 . Derrida, Jacques, quoted in: Wigley, Mark, op. cit., p.180 5. Calvino, Italo, If on a winter’s night a traveler, A Harvest/HBJ Book, 1979, p. 3 7. Calvino, Italo, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Harvest/ HBJ Book, 1979, p. 3 Revised version of: Adam Budak, Endless Unfolding of (Spatial) Durée, first published in: Monika Sosnowska, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Cologne, 2007, pp. 32-41

41

The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism Beatriz Colomina

1. Moller House, Vienna, 1928.

The raised sitting area off the living room

42

There is an unknown passage of a well-known book, Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme (1925), which reads: “Loos told me one day: ‘A cultivated man does not look out of the window; his window is a ground glass; it is there only to let the light in, not to let the gaze pass through.’ “1 It points to a conspicuous yet conspicuously ignored feature of Loos’ houses: not only are the windows either opaque or covered with sheer curtains, but the organization of the spaces and the disposition of the built-in furniture (the immeuble) seems to hinder access to them. A sofa is often placed at the foot of a window so as to position the occupants with their back to it, facing the room.

Moreover, upon entering a Loos interior one’s body is continually turned around to face the space one just moved through, rather than the upcoming space or the space outside. With each turn, each return look, the body is arrested.

Looking at the photographs, it is easy to imagine oneself in these precise, static positions, usually indicated by the unoccupied furniture. The photographs suggest that it is intended that these spaces be comprehended by occupation, by using this furniture, by entering the photograph, by inhabiting it.

In the Moller House (Vienna, 1928), for example, there is a raised sitting area off the living room with a sofa set against the window. Although one cannot see out the window, its presence is strongly felt. The bookshelves surrounding the sofa and the light coming from behind it suggest a comfortable nook for reading (figure 1). But comfort in this space is more than just sensual, for there is also a psychological dimension. A sense of security is produced by the position of the couch, the placement of its occupants, against the light. Anyone who, ascending the stairs from the entrance (itself a rather dark

passage), enters the living room, would take a few moments to recognize a person sitting in the couch. Conversely, any intrusion would soon be detected by a person occupying this area, just as an actor entering the stage is immediately seen by a spectator in a theater box.

Loos refers to the idea of the theater box in noting that “the smallness of a theater box would be unbearable if one could not look out into the large space beyond.”2 While Kulka, and later Münz, read this comment in terms of the economy of space provided by the Raumplan, they overlook its psychological dimension. For Loos, the theater box exists at the intersection between claustrophobia and agoraphobia. This spatial-psychological device could also be read in terms of power, regimes of control inside the house. The raised sitting area of the Moller House provides the occupant with a vantage point overlooking the interior. Comfort in this space is related to both intimacy and control.

This area is the most intimate of the sequence of living spaces, yet, paradoxically, rather than being at the heart of the house, it is placed at the periphery, pushing a volume out of the street façade, just above the front entrance. More­over, it corresponds with the largest window on this elevation (almost a horizontal window) (figure 2).

The occupant of this space can both detect anyone crossing-trespassing the threshold of the house (while screened by the curtain) and monitor any movement in the interior (while screened by the backlighting).

In this space, the window is only a source of light (not a frame for a view). The eye is turned towards the interior. The only exterior view that would be possible from this position requires that the gaze travel the whole depth of the house, from the alcove to the living room to the music room, which opens onto the back garden (figure 3). Thus, the exterior view depends upon a view of the interior.

The look folded inward upon itself can be traced in other Loos interiors. In the Müller House in Prague, for instance, the sequence of spaces, articulated around the staircase, follows an increasing sense of privacy from the drawing room, to the dining room and study, to the “lady’s room” (­Zimmer der Dame) with its raised sitting area, which occupies the center, or heart, of the house.

But the window of this space looks onto the living space. Here, too, the most intimate room is like a

2. Moller House. View from the street

3. Moller House. Plan and section tracing the journey of the gaze from the raised sitting area to the back garden

43

The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism Beatriz Colomina

1. Moller House, Vienna, 1928.

The raised sitting area off the living room

42

There is an unknown passage of a well-known book, Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme (1925), which reads: “Loos told me one day: ‘A cultivated man does not look out of the window; his window is a ground glass; it is there only to let the light in, not to let the gaze pass through.’ “1 It points to a conspicuous yet conspicuously ignored feature of Loos’ houses: not only are the windows either opaque or covered with sheer curtains, but the organization of the spaces and the disposition of the built-in furniture (the immeuble) seems to hinder access to them. A sofa is often placed at the foot of a window so as to position the occupants with their back to it, facing the room.

Moreover, upon entering a Loos interior one’s body is continually turned around to face the space one just moved through, rather than the upcoming space or the space outside. With each turn, each return look, the body is arrested.

Looking at the photographs, it is easy to imagine oneself in these precise, static positions, usually indicated by the unoccupied furniture. The photographs suggest that it is intended that these spaces be comprehended by occupation, by using this furniture, by entering the photograph, by inhabiting it.

In the Moller House (Vienna, 1928), for example, there is a raised sitting area off the living room with a sofa set against the window. Although one cannot see out the window, its presence is strongly felt. The bookshelves surrounding the sofa and the light coming from behind it suggest a comfortable nook for reading (figure 1). But comfort in this space is more than just sensual, for there is also a psychological dimension. A sense of security is produced by the position of the couch, the placement of its occupants, against the light. Anyone who, ascending the stairs from the entrance (itself a rather dark

passage), enters the living room, would take a few moments to recognize a person sitting in the couch. Conversely, any intrusion would soon be detected by a person occupying this area, just as an actor entering the stage is immediately seen by a spectator in a theater box.

Loos refers to the idea of the theater box in noting that “the smallness of a theater box would be unbearable if one could not look out into the large space beyond.”2 While Kulka, and later Münz, read this comment in terms of the economy of space provided by the Raumplan, they overlook its psychological dimension. For Loos, the theater box exists at the intersection between claustrophobia and agoraphobia. This spatial-psychological device could also be read in terms of power, regimes of control inside the house. The raised sitting area of the Moller House provides the occupant with a vantage point overlooking the interior. Comfort in this space is related to both intimacy and control.

This area is the most intimate of the sequence of living spaces, yet, paradoxically, rather than being at the heart of the house, it is placed at the periphery, pushing a volume out of the street façade, just above the front entrance. More­over, it corresponds with the largest window on this elevation (almost a horizontal window) (figure 2).

The occupant of this space can both detect anyone crossing-trespassing the threshold of the house (while screened by the curtain) and monitor any movement in the interior (while screened by the backlighting).

In this space, the window is only a source of light (not a frame for a view). The eye is turned towards the interior. The only exterior view that would be possible from this position requires that the gaze travel the whole depth of the house, from the alcove to the living room to the music room, which opens onto the back garden (figure 3). Thus, the exterior view depends upon a view of the interior.

The look folded inward upon itself can be traced in other Loos interiors. In the Müller House in Prague, for instance, the sequence of spaces, articulated around the staircase, follows an increasing sense of privacy from the drawing room, to the dining room and study, to the “lady’s room” (­Zimmer der Dame) with its raised sitting area, which occupies the center, or heart, of the house.

But the window of this space looks onto the living space. Here, too, the most intimate room is like a

2. Moller House. View from the street

3. Moller House. Plan and section tracing the journey of the gaze from the raised sitting area to the back garden

43

theater box, placed just over the entrance to the social spaces in this house, so that any intruder could easily be seen. Likewise, the view of the exterior, towards the city, from this theater box, is contained within a view of the interior. Suspended in the middle of the house, this space assumes both the character of a sacred space and of a point of control. Comfort is paradoxically produced by two seemingly opposing conditions, intimacy and control.

This is hardly the idea of comfort which is associated with the nineteenth-century interior as described by Walter Benjamin in Louis-Philippe, or the Interior.3 In Loos’ interiors the sense of security is not achieved by simply turning one’s back on the exterior and immersing oneself in a private universe—“a box in the world theater,” to use Benjamin’s metaphor. It is no longer the house that is a theater box; there is a theater box inside the house, overlooking the internal social spaces. The inhabitants of Loos’ houses are both actors in and spectators of the family scene—involved in, yet detached from, their own space. The classical distinction between inside and outside, private and public, object and subject, becomes convoluted.

The theatricality of Loos’ interiors is constructed by many forms of representation (of which built space is not necessarily the most important).

Many of the photographs, for instance, tend to give the impression that someone is just about to enter the room, that a piece of domestic drama is about to be enacted. The characters absent from the stage, from the scenery and from its props the conspicuously placed pieces of furniture are conjured up.

In his writings on the question of the house, Loos describes a number of domestic melodramas. In Das Andere, for example, he writes: Try to describe how birth and death, the screams of pain for an aborted son, the death rattle of a dying mother, the last thoughts of a young woman who wishes to die … unfold and unravel in a room by Olbrich! Just an image: the young woman who has put herself to death. She is lying on the wooden floor. One of her hands still holds the smoking revolver. On the table a letter, the farewell letter. Is the room in which this is happening of good taste? Who will ask that? It is just a room!4

The house is the stage for the theater of the family, a place where people are born and live and die. Whereas a work of art, a painting, presents itself to critical attention as an object, the house is received as an environment, as a stage.

44

To set the scene, Loos breaks down the condition of the house as an object by radically convoluting the relation between inside and outside. One of the devices he uses is mirrors which appear to be openings, and openings which can be mistaken for mirrors. Even more enigmatic is the placement, in the dining room of the Steiner House (Vienna, 1910), of a mirror just beneath an opaque window.Here, again, the window is only a source of light. The mirror, placed at eye level, returns the gaze to the interior, to the lamp above the dining table and the objects on the sideboard, recalling Freud’s studio in Berggasse 19, where a small framed mirror hanging against the window reflects the lamp on his work table. In Freudian theory the mirror represents the psyche. The reflection in the mirror is also a self-portrait projected onto the outside world.

The placement of Freud’s mirror on the boundary between interior and exterior undermines the status of the boundary as a fixed limit. Inside and outside cannot simply be separated. Similarly, Loos’ mirrors promote the interplay between reality and illusion, between the actual and virtual, undermining the status of the boundary between inside and outside.

This ambiguity between inside and outside is intensified by the separation of sight from the other senses. Physical and visual connections between the spaces in Loos’ houses are often separated. In the Moller House there appears to be no way of entering the dining room from the music room, which is 70 centimeters below; the only means of access is by unfolding steps which are hidden in the timber base of the dining room. This strategy of physical separation and visual connection, of framing, is repeated in many other Loos interiors. Openings are often screened by curtains, enhancing the stagelike effect.

But the breakdown between inside and outside, and the split between sight and touch, is not located exclusively in the domestic scene. It also occurs in Loos’ project for a house for Josephine Baker (Paris, 1928) (figure 4)—a house that excludes family life. However, in this instance the split acquires a different meaning. The house was designed to contain a large top-lit, doubleheight swimming pool, with entry at the secondfloor level. Kurt Ungers, a close collaborator of Loos in this project, wrote:

The reception rooms on the first floor arranged round the pool—a large salon with an extensive top-lit vestibule, a small lounge and the circular café—indicate that this was intended not for private use but as a miniature entertainment centre. On the first floor, low passages surround the pool. They are lit by the wide windows visible on the outside, and from them, thick, transparent windows are let into the side of the pool, so that it was possible to watch swimming and diving in its crystal-clear water, flooded with light from above: an underwater revue, so to speak.5 [author’s emphasis]

As in Loos’ earlier houses, the eye is directed towards the interior, which turns its back on the outside world; but the subject and object of the gaze have been reversed. The inhabitant, Josephine Baker, is now the primary object, and the visitor, the guest, is the looking subject. The most intimate space—the swimming pool, paradigm of a sensual space—occupies the center of the house, and is also the focus of the visitor’s gaze. As Ungers writes, entertainment in this house consists in looking. But between this gaze and its object— the body—is a screen of glass and water, which renders the body inaccessible. The swimming pool is lit from above, by a skylight, so that inside it the windows would appear as reflective surfaces, impeding the swimmer’s view of the visitors standing in the passages. This view is the opposite of the panoptic view of a theater box, corresponding instead to that of the peephole, where subject and object cannot simply exchange places.

The split between sight and the other physical senses found in Loos’ interiors is explicit in his definition of architecture. In The Principle of Cladding he writes:

4. Project for a house for Josephine Baker in Paris, 1928 Model

the artist, the architect, first senses the effect [author’s emphasis] that he intends to realize and sees the rooms he wants to create in his mind’s eye. He senses the effect that he wishes to exert upon the spectator [author’s emphasis]. … homeyness if [it is] a residence.6

For Loos, the interior is pre-Oedipal space, space before the analytical distancing which language entails, space as we feel it, as clothing.

For Loos, architecture is a form of covering, but it is not the walls that are covered. Structure plays a secondary role, and its primary function is to hold the covering in place: The architect’s general task is to provide a warm and livable space. Carpets are warm and livable. He decides for this reason to spread one carpet on the floor and to hang up four to form the four walls. But you cannot build a house out of carpets. Both the carpet on the floor and the tapestry on the wall require a structural frame to hold them in the correct place. To invent this frame is the architect’s second task.7

45

theater box, placed just over the entrance to the social spaces in this house, so that any intruder could easily be seen. Likewise, the view of the exterior, towards the city, from this theater box, is contained within a view of the interior. Suspended in the middle of the house, this space assumes both the character of a sacred space and of a point of control. Comfort is paradoxically produced by two seemingly opposing conditions, intimacy and control.

This is hardly the idea of comfort which is associated with the nineteenth-century interior as described by Walter Benjamin in Louis-Philippe, or the Interior.3 In Loos’ interiors the sense of security is not achieved by simply turning one’s back on the exterior and immersing oneself in a private universe—“a box in the world theater,” to use Benjamin’s metaphor. It is no longer the house that is a theater box; there is a theater box inside the house, overlooking the internal social spaces. The inhabitants of Loos’ houses are both actors in and spectators of the family scene—involved in, yet detached from, their own space. The classical distinction between inside and outside, private and public, object and subject, becomes convoluted.

The theatricality of Loos’ interiors is constructed by many forms of representation (of which built space is not necessarily the most important).

Many of the photographs, for instance, tend to give the impression that someone is just about to enter the room, that a piece of domestic drama is about to be enacted. The characters absent from the stage, from the scenery and from its props the conspicuously placed pieces of furniture are conjured up.

In his writings on the question of the house, Loos describes a number of domestic melodramas. In Das Andere, for example, he writes: Try to describe how birth and death, the screams of pain for an aborted son, the death rattle of a dying mother, the last thoughts of a young woman who wishes to die … unfold and unravel in a room by Olbrich! Just an image: the young woman who has put herself to death. She is lying on the wooden floor. One of her hands still holds the smoking revolver. On the table a letter, the farewell letter. Is the room in which this is happening of good taste? Who will ask that? It is just a room!4

The house is the stage for the theater of the family, a place where people are born and live and die. Whereas a work of art, a painting, presents itself to critical attention as an object, the house is received as an environment, as a stage.

44

To set the scene, Loos breaks down the condition of the house as an object by radically convoluting the relation between inside and outside. One of the devices he uses is mirrors which appear to be openings, and openings which can be mistaken for mirrors. Even more enigmatic is the placement, in the dining room of the Steiner House (Vienna, 1910), of a mirror just beneath an opaque window.Here, again, the window is only a source of light. The mirror, placed at eye level, returns the gaze to the interior, to the lamp above the dining table and the objects on the sideboard, recalling Freud’s studio in Berggasse 19, where a small framed mirror hanging against the window reflects the lamp on his work table. In Freudian theory the mirror represents the psyche. The reflection in the mirror is also a self-portrait projected onto the outside world.

The placement of Freud’s mirror on the boundary between interior and exterior undermines the status of the boundary as a fixed limit. Inside and outside cannot simply be separated. Similarly, Loos’ mirrors promote the interplay between reality and illusion, between the actual and virtual, undermining the status of the boundary between inside and outside.

This ambiguity between inside and outside is intensified by the separation of sight from the other senses. Physical and visual connections between the spaces in Loos’ houses are often separated. In the Moller House there appears to be no way of entering the dining room from the music room, which is 70 centimeters below; the only means of access is by unfolding steps which are hidden in the timber base of the dining room. This strategy of physical separation and visual connection, of framing, is repeated in many other Loos interiors. Openings are often screened by curtains, enhancing the stagelike effect.

But the breakdown between inside and outside, and the split between sight and touch, is not located exclusively in the domestic scene. It also occurs in Loos’ project for a house for Josephine Baker (Paris, 1928) (figure 4)—a house that excludes family life. However, in this instance the split acquires a different meaning. The house was designed to contain a large top-lit, doubleheight swimming pool, with entry at the secondfloor level. Kurt Ungers, a close collaborator of Loos in this project, wrote:

The reception rooms on the first floor arranged round the pool—a large salon with an extensive top-lit vestibule, a small lounge and the circular café—indicate that this was intended not for private use but as a miniature entertainment centre. On the first floor, low passages surround the pool. They are lit by the wide windows visible on the outside, and from them, thick, transparent windows are let into the side of the pool, so that it was possible to watch swimming and diving in its crystal-clear water, flooded with light from above: an underwater revue, so to speak.5 [author’s emphasis]

As in Loos’ earlier houses, the eye is directed towards the interior, which turns its back on the outside world; but the subject and object of the gaze have been reversed. The inhabitant, Josephine Baker, is now the primary object, and the visitor, the guest, is the looking subject. The most intimate space—the swimming pool, paradigm of a sensual space—occupies the center of the house, and is also the focus of the visitor’s gaze. As Ungers writes, entertainment in this house consists in looking. But between this gaze and its object— the body—is a screen of glass and water, which renders the body inaccessible. The swimming pool is lit from above, by a skylight, so that inside it the windows would appear as reflective surfaces, impeding the swimmer’s view of the visitors standing in the passages. This view is the opposite of the panoptic view of a theater box, corresponding instead to that of the peephole, where subject and object cannot simply exchange places.

The split between sight and the other physical senses found in Loos’ interiors is explicit in his definition of architecture. In The Principle of Cladding he writes:

4. Project for a house for Josephine Baker in Paris, 1928 Model

the artist, the architect, first senses the effect [author’s emphasis] that he intends to realize and sees the rooms he wants to create in his mind’s eye. He senses the effect that he wishes to exert upon the spectator [author’s emphasis]. … homeyness if [it is] a residence.6

For Loos, the interior is pre-Oedipal space, space before the analytical distancing which language entails, space as we feel it, as clothing.

For Loos, architecture is a form of covering, but it is not the walls that are covered. Structure plays a secondary role, and its primary function is to hold the covering in place: The architect’s general task is to provide a warm and livable space. Carpets are warm and livable. He decides for this reason to spread one carpet on the floor and to hang up four to form the four walls. But you cannot build a house out of carpets. Both the carpet on the floor and the tapestry on the wall require a structural frame to hold them in the correct place. To invent this frame is the architect’s second task.7

45

5. Adolf Loos’ flat. Lina Loos’ bedroom

6. Villa Savoye. View of the kitchen

7. Villa Garches, 1927. View of the kitchen

But space in Loos’ architecture is not just felt. It is significant, in the quotation above, that Loos refers to the inhabitant as a spectator, for his definition of architecture is really a definition of theatrical architecture. The clothes have become so removed from the body that they require structural support independent of it. They become a stage set. The inhabitant is both covered by the space and detached from it. The tension between sensation of comfort and comfort as control disrupts the role of the house as a traditional form of representation.

This is not simply a metaphor. In every Loos house there is a point of maximum tension and it always coincides with a threshold or boundary. In the Moller house it is the raised alcove protruding from the street facade, where the occupant is ensconced in the security of the interior, yet detached from it. The subject of Loos’ houses is a stranger, an intruder in his own space. In Josephine Baker’s house, the wall of the swimming pool is punctured by windows. It has been pulled apart, leaving a narrow passage surrounding the pool, and splitting each of the windows into an internal window and an external window. The visitor literally inhabits this wall, which enables him to look both inside, at the pool, and outside, at the city, but he is neither inside nor outside the house.

In the dining room of the Steiner House, the gaze directed towards the window is folded back by the mirror beneath it, transforming the interior into an exterior view, a scene. The subject has been dislocated: unable to occupy the inside of the house securely, it can only occupy the insecure margin between window and mirror.8 In the houses of Le Corbusier the reverse condition of Loos’ interiors may be observed. In photographs windows are never covered with curtains, neither is access to them hampered by objects.

On the contrary, everything in these houses seems to be disposed in a way that continuously throws the subject towards the periphery of the house. The look is directed to the exterior in such deliberate manner as to suggest the reading of these houses as frames for a view. These frames are given temporality through the promenade.

Unlike Adolf Loos’ houses, perception here occurs in motion. It is hard to think of oneself in static positions. If the photographs of Loos’ interiors give the impression that somebody is about to enter the room, in Le Corbusier’s the impres-

sion is that somebody was just there, leaving as traces a coat and a hat lying on the table by the entrance of Villa Savoye or some bread and a jug on the kitchen table (figure 6; note also that the door here has been left open, further suggesting the idea that we have just missed somebody), or a raw fish in the kitchen of Garches (figure 7).

And even once we have reached the highest point of the house, as in the terrace of Villa Savoye in the sill of the window which frames the landscape, the culminating point of the promenade, here also we find a hat, a pair of sunglasses, a little package (cigarettes?) and a lighter, and now, where did the gentleman go? Because of course, you would have noticed already, that the personal objects are all male objects (never a handbag, a lipstick, or some piece of women’s clothing). But before that. We are following somebody, the traces of his existence presented to us in the form of a series of photographs of the interior. The look into these photographs is a forbidden look. The look of a detective. A voyeuristic look.9 In the film L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui (1929) directed by Pierre Chenal with Le Corbusier,10 the latter as the main actor drives his own car to the entrance of Villa Garches, descends, and enters the house in an energetic manner. He is wearing a dark suit with bow tie, his hair is glued with brilliantine, every hair in place, he is holding a cigarette in his mouth. The camera pans through the exterior of the house and arrives at the roof garden, where there are women sitting down and children playing. A little boy is driving his toy car. At this point Le Corbusier appears again but on the other side of the terrace (he never comes in contact with the women and children). He is puffing his cigarette. He then very athletically climbs up the spiral staircase which leads to the highest point of the house, a lookout point. Still wearing his formal attire, the cigarette still sticking out of his mouth, he pauses to contemplate the view from that point. He looks out.

There is also a figure of a woman going through a house in this movie. The house that frames her is Villa Savoye. Here there is no car arriving. The camera shows the house from the distance, an object sitting in the landscape, and then pans the outside and the inside of the house. And it is there, halfway through the interior, that the woman appears in the screen. She is already inside, already contained by the house, bounded.

She opens the door that leads to the terrace

and goes up the ramp toward the roof garden, her back to the camera. She is wearing informal clothes and high heels and she holds to the handrail as she goes up, her skirt and hair blowing in the wind. She appears vulnerable. Her body is fragmented, framed not only by the camera but by the house itself, behind bars (figure 8).

She appears to be moving from the inside of the house to the outside, to the roof garden. But this outside is again constructed as an inside with a wall wrapping the space in which an opening with the proportions of a window frames the landscape. The woman continues walking along the wall, as if protected by it, and as the wall makes a curve to form the solarium, the woman turns too, picks up a chair, and sits down. She would be facing the interior, the space she has just moved through. But for the camera, which now shows us a general view of the terrace, she has disappeared behind the plants. That is, just at the moment when she has turned and could face the camera (there is nowhere else to go), she vanishes. She never catches our eye. Here we are literally following somebody, the point of view is that of a voyeur.

We could accumulate more evidence. Few photographs of Le Corbusier’s buildings show people in them. But in those few, women always look away from the camera: most of the time they are shot from the back and they almost never occupy the same space as men. Take the photographs of Immeuble Clarté in the Œuvre complète, for example. In one of them, the woman and the child are in the interior, they are shot from the back, facing the wall; the men are in the balcony, looking out, toward the city. In the next shot, the woman, again shot from the back, is leaning against the window to the balcony and looking at the man and the child who are on the balcony.

This spatial structure is repeated very often, not only in the photographs but also the drawings of Le Corbusier’s projects. In a drawing of the Wanner project, for example, the woman in the upper floor is leaning against the veranda, looking down at her hero, the boxer, who is occupying the jardin suspendu. He looks at his punching bag. And in the drawing Ferme radieuse, the woman in the kitchen looks over the counter toward the man sitting at the dining room table. He is reading the newspaper. Here again the woman is placed inside, the man outside, the woman looks at the man, the man looks at the world.

47

5. Adolf Loos’ flat. Lina Loos’ bedroom

6. Villa Savoye. View of the kitchen

7. Villa Garches, 1927. View of the kitchen

But space in Loos’ architecture is not just felt. It is significant, in the quotation above, that Loos refers to the inhabitant as a spectator, for his definition of architecture is really a definition of theatrical architecture. The clothes have become so removed from the body that they require structural support independent of it. They become a stage set. The inhabitant is both covered by the space and detached from it. The tension between sensation of comfort and comfort as control disrupts the role of the house as a traditional form of representation.

This is not simply a metaphor. In every Loos house there is a point of maximum tension and it always coincides with a threshold or boundary. In the Moller house it is the raised alcove protruding from the street facade, where the occupant is ensconced in the security of the interior, yet detached from it. The subject of Loos’ houses is a stranger, an intruder in his own space. In Josephine Baker’s house, the wall of the swimming pool is punctured by windows. It has been pulled apart, leaving a narrow passage surrounding the pool, and splitting each of the windows into an internal window and an external window. The visitor literally inhabits this wall, which enables him to look both inside, at the pool, and outside, at the city, but he is neither inside nor outside the house.

In the dining room of the Steiner House, the gaze directed towards the window is folded back by the mirror beneath it, transforming the interior into an exterior view, a scene. The subject has been dislocated: unable to occupy the inside of the house securely, it can only occupy the insecure margin between window and mirror.8 In the houses of Le Corbusier the reverse condition of Loos’ interiors may be observed. In photographs windows are never covered with curtains, neither is access to them hampered by objects.

On the contrary, everything in these houses seems to be disposed in a way that continuously throws the subject towards the periphery of the house. The look is directed to the exterior in such deliberate manner as to suggest the reading of these houses as frames for a view. These frames are given temporality through the promenade.

Unlike Adolf Loos’ houses, perception here occurs in motion. It is hard to think of oneself in static positions. If the photographs of Loos’ interiors give the impression that somebody is about to enter the room, in Le Corbusier’s the impres-

sion is that somebody was just there, leaving as traces a coat and a hat lying on the table by the entrance of Villa Savoye or some bread and a jug on the kitchen table (figure 6; note also that the door here has been left open, further suggesting the idea that we have just missed somebody), or a raw fish in the kitchen of Garches (figure 7).

And even once we have reached the highest point of the house, as in the terrace of Villa Savoye in the sill of the window which frames the landscape, the culminating point of the promenade, here also we find a hat, a pair of sunglasses, a little package (cigarettes?) and a lighter, and now, where did the gentleman go? Because of course, you would have noticed already, that the personal objects are all male objects (never a handbag, a lipstick, or some piece of women’s clothing). But before that. We are following somebody, the traces of his existence presented to us in the form of a series of photographs of the interior. The look into these photographs is a forbidden look. The look of a detective. A voyeuristic look.9 In the film L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui (1929) directed by Pierre Chenal with Le Corbusier,10 the latter as the main actor drives his own car to the entrance of Villa Garches, descends, and enters the house in an energetic manner. He is wearing a dark suit with bow tie, his hair is glued with brilliantine, every hair in place, he is holding a cigarette in his mouth. The camera pans through the exterior of the house and arrives at the roof garden, where there are women sitting down and children playing. A little boy is driving his toy car. At this point Le Corbusier appears again but on the other side of the terrace (he never comes in contact with the women and children). He is puffing his cigarette. He then very athletically climbs up the spiral staircase which leads to the highest point of the house, a lookout point. Still wearing his formal attire, the cigarette still sticking out of his mouth, he pauses to contemplate the view from that point. He looks out.

There is also a figure of a woman going through a house in this movie. The house that frames her is Villa Savoye. Here there is no car arriving. The camera shows the house from the distance, an object sitting in the landscape, and then pans the outside and the inside of the house. And it is there, halfway through the interior, that the woman appears in the screen. She is already inside, already contained by the house, bounded.

She opens the door that leads to the terrace

and goes up the ramp toward the roof garden, her back to the camera. She is wearing informal clothes and high heels and she holds to the handrail as she goes up, her skirt and hair blowing in the wind. She appears vulnerable. Her body is fragmented, framed not only by the camera but by the house itself, behind bars (figure 8).

She appears to be moving from the inside of the house to the outside, to the roof garden. But this outside is again constructed as an inside with a wall wrapping the space in which an opening with the proportions of a window frames the landscape. The woman continues walking along the wall, as if protected by it, and as the wall makes a curve to form the solarium, the woman turns too, picks up a chair, and sits down. She would be facing the interior, the space she has just moved through. But for the camera, which now shows us a general view of the terrace, she has disappeared behind the plants. That is, just at the moment when she has turned and could face the camera (there is nowhere else to go), she vanishes. She never catches our eye. Here we are literally following somebody, the point of view is that of a voyeur.

We could accumulate more evidence. Few photographs of Le Corbusier’s buildings show people in them. But in those few, women always look away from the camera: most of the time they are shot from the back and they almost never occupy the same space as men. Take the photographs of Immeuble Clarté in the Œuvre complète, for example. In one of them, the woman and the child are in the interior, they are shot from the back, facing the wall; the men are in the balcony, looking out, toward the city. In the next shot, the woman, again shot from the back, is leaning against the window to the balcony and looking at the man and the child who are on the balcony.

This spatial structure is repeated very often, not only in the photographs but also the drawings of Le Corbusier’s projects. In a drawing of the Wanner project, for example, the woman in the upper floor is leaning against the veranda, looking down at her hero, the boxer, who is occupying the jardin suspendu. He looks at his punching bag. And in the drawing Ferme radieuse, the woman in the kitchen looks over the counter toward the man sitting at the dining room table. He is reading the newspaper. Here again the woman is placed inside, the man outside, the woman looks at the man, the man looks at the world.

47

8. Villa Savoye. Still from L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui.

“Un maison ce n’est pas une prison: l’aspect change à chaque pas.”

9. Charlotte Perriand in the chaise-longue against the wall Salon d’Automne 1929

48

But perhaps no example is more telling than the photo collage of the exhibit of a living room in the Salon d’Automne 1929, including all the equipment of a dwelling, a project that Le Corbusier realized in collaboration with Charlotte Perriand.

In this image which Le Corbusier has published in the Oeuvre complète, Perriand herself is lying on the chaise-longue, her head turned away from the camera. More significant, in the original photograph employed in this photo collage (as well as in another photograph in the Œuvre complète which shows the chaise-longue in the horizontal position), one can see that the chair has been placed right against the wall. Remarkably, she is facing the wall. She is almost an attachment to the wall. She sees nothing (figure 9).

And of course for Le Corbusier—who writes things such as “I exist in life only on condition that I see” (Précisions, 1930) or “This is the key: to look … to look/observe/see/imagine/invent, create” (1963), and in the last weeks of his life: “I am and I remain an impenitent visual” (Mise au Point)—everything is in the visual.11 But what does vision mean here?

We should now return to the passage in Urbanisme which opens this paper (“Loos told me one day: ‘A cultivated man does not look out of the window…’”) because in that very passage he has provided us with a clue to the enigma when he goes on to say: “Such sentiment [that of Loos with regard to the window] can have an explanation in the congested, disordered city where disorder appears in distressing images; one could even admit the paradox [of a Loosian window] before a sublime natural spectacle, too sublime.”12 For Le Corbusier the metropolis itself was “too sublime.” The look, in Le Corbusier’s architecture, is not that look which would still pretend to contemplate the metropolitan spectacle with the detachment of a nineteenth-century observer before a sublime, natural landscape.

In this sense, the penthouse that Le Corbusier did for Charles de Beistegui on the ChampsElysées, Paris (1929-31) becomes symptomatic.

In this house, originally intended not to be inhabited but to serve as a frame for big parties, there was no electric lighting. But electricity is used inside this apartment to slide away partition walls, operate doors, and allow cinematographic projections on the metal screen (which unfolds automatically as the chandelier rises up on pulleys), and outside, on the roof terrace, to slide the banks of hedges to frame the view of Paris:

“En pressant un bouton électrique, la palissade de verdure s’écarte et Paris apparaît.”13 In this penthouse, once the upper level of the terrace is reached, the high walls of the chambre ouverte allow only fragments of the urban skyline to emerge: the tops of the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré Coeur, Invalides, etc. (figure 10).

And it is only by remaining inside and making use of the periscope camera obscura that it becomes possible to enjoy the metropolitan spectacle (figure 11).

But if this periscope, this primitive form of prosthesis, this “artificial limb,” to return to Le Corbusier’s concept in L’Art décorative d’aujourd’hui, is necessary in the Beistegui apartment (as also was the rest of the artifice in this house, the electrically driven framing devices, the other prostheses) it is only because the apartment is still located in a nineteenth-century city: it is a penthouse in the Champs-Elysées. In ideal urban conditions, the house itself becomes the artifice.

For Le Corbusier the new urban conditions are a consequence of the media, which institutes a relationship between artifact and nature that makes the defensiveness of a Loosian window, of a Loosian system, unnecessary. In Urbanisme, in the same passage where he makes reference to “Loos’ window,” Le Corbusier goes on to write: “The horizontal gaze leads far away. … From our offices we will get the feeling of being look-outs dominating a world in order. … The skyscrapers concentrate everything in themselves: machines for abolishing time and space, telephones, cables, radios.”14 The inward gaze, the gaze turned upon itself, of Loos’ interiors becomes with Le Corbusier a gaze of domination over the exterior world.

For Le Corbusier, the house is a camera pointed at nature. Detached from nature, it is mobile.

Just as the camera can be taken from Paris to the desert, the house can be taken from Poissy to Biarritz to Argentina. In Précisions, Le Corbusier describes Villa Savoye as follows:

10. Apartement Beistegui. “La chambre à ciel ouvert.”

11. Apartement Beistegui. Periscope

The house is a box in the air, pierced all around, without interruption, by a fenêtre en longueur. … The box is in the middle of meadows, dominating the orchard. … The simple posts of the ground floor, through a precise disposition, cut up the landscape with a regularity that has the effect of suppressing any notion of front or back of the house, of side of the house. … The plan is pure, made for the most exact of needs. It is in its right place in the rural landscape of Poissy. But in Biarritz, it would be magnificent. … I am going to implant this very house in the beautiful Argentinian countryside: we will have twenty houses rising from the high grass of an orchard where cows continue to graze.15

49

8. Villa Savoye. Still from L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui.

“Un maison ce n’est pas une prison: l’aspect change à chaque pas.”

9. Charlotte Perriand in the chaise-longue against the wall Salon d’Automne 1929

48

But perhaps no example is more telling than the photo collage of the exhibit of a living room in the Salon d’Automne 1929, including all the equipment of a dwelling, a project that Le Corbusier realized in collaboration with Charlotte Perriand.

In this image which Le Corbusier has published in the Oeuvre complète, Perriand herself is lying on the chaise-longue, her head turned away from the camera. More significant, in the original photograph employed in this photo collage (as well as in another photograph in the Œuvre complète which shows the chaise-longue in the horizontal position), one can see that the chair has been placed right against the wall. Remarkably, she is facing the wall. She is almost an attachment to the wall. She sees nothing (figure 9).

And of course for Le Corbusier—who writes things such as “I exist in life only on condition that I see” (Précisions, 1930) or “This is the key: to look … to look/observe/see/imagine/invent, create” (1963), and in the last weeks of his life: “I am and I remain an impenitent visual” (Mise au Point)—everything is in the visual.11 But what does vision mean here?

We should now return to the passage in Urbanisme which opens this paper (“Loos told me one day: ‘A cultivated man does not look out of the window…’”) because in that very passage he has provided us with a clue to the enigma when he goes on to say: “Such sentiment [that of Loos with regard to the window] can have an explanation in the congested, disordered city where disorder appears in distressing images; one could even admit the paradox [of a Loosian window] before a sublime natural spectacle, too sublime.”12 For Le Corbusier the metropolis itself was “too sublime.” The look, in Le Corbusier’s architecture, is not that look which would still pretend to contemplate the metropolitan spectacle with the detachment of a nineteenth-century observer before a sublime, natural landscape.

In this sense, the penthouse that Le Corbusier did for Charles de Beistegui on the ChampsElysées, Paris (1929-31) becomes symptomatic.

In this house, originally intended not to be inhabited but to serve as a frame for big parties, there was no electric lighting. But electricity is used inside this apartment to slide away partition walls, operate doors, and allow cinematographic projections on the metal screen (which unfolds automatically as the chandelier rises up on pulleys), and outside, on the roof terrace, to slide the banks of hedges to frame the view of Paris:

“En pressant un bouton électrique, la palissade de verdure s’écarte et Paris apparaît.”13 In this penthouse, once the upper level of the terrace is reached, the high walls of the chambre ouverte allow only fragments of the urban skyline to emerge: the tops of the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Sacré Coeur, Invalides, etc. (figure 10).

And it is only by remaining inside and making use of the periscope camera obscura that it becomes possible to enjoy the metropolitan spectacle (figure 11).

But if this periscope, this primitive form of prosthesis, this “artificial limb,” to return to Le Corbusier’s concept in L’Art décorative d’aujourd’hui, is necessary in the Beistegui apartment (as also was the rest of the artifice in this house, the electrically driven framing devices, the other prostheses) it is only because the apartment is still located in a nineteenth-century city: it is a penthouse in the Champs-Elysées. In ideal urban conditions, the house itself becomes the artifice.

For Le Corbusier the new urban conditions are a consequence of the media, which institutes a relationship between artifact and nature that makes the defensiveness of a Loosian window, of a Loosian system, unnecessary. In Urbanisme, in the same passage where he makes reference to “Loos’ window,” Le Corbusier goes on to write: “The horizontal gaze leads far away. … From our offices we will get the feeling of being look-outs dominating a world in order. … The skyscrapers concentrate everything in themselves: machines for abolishing time and space, telephones, cables, radios.”14 The inward gaze, the gaze turned upon itself, of Loos’ interiors becomes with Le Corbusier a gaze of domination over the exterior world.

For Le Corbusier, the house is a camera pointed at nature. Detached from nature, it is mobile.

Just as the camera can be taken from Paris to the desert, the house can be taken from Poissy to Biarritz to Argentina. In Précisions, Le Corbusier describes Villa Savoye as follows:

10. Apartement Beistegui. “La chambre à ciel ouvert.”

11. Apartement Beistegui. Periscope

The house is a box in the air, pierced all around, without interruption, by a fenêtre en longueur. … The box is in the middle of meadows, dominating the orchard. … The simple posts of the ground floor, through a precise disposition, cut up the landscape with a regularity that has the effect of suppressing any notion of front or back of the house, of side of the house. … The plan is pure, made for the most exact of needs. It is in its right place in the rural landscape of Poissy. But in Biarritz, it would be magnificent. … I am going to implant this very house in the beautiful Argentinian countryside: we will have twenty houses rising from the high grass of an orchard where cows continue to graze.15

49

12. Sketch in La Ville radieuse, 1933

The house is being described in terms of the way it frames the landscape and the effect this framing has on the perception of the house itself by the moving visitor. The house is in the air. There is no front, no back, no side to this house. The house can be in any place. The house is immaterial. That is, the house is not simply constructed as a material object from which, then, certain views become possible. The house is no more than a series of views choreographed by the visitor, the way a filmmaker effects the montage of a film.16 In Rio de Janeiro, Le Corbusier developed a series of drawings in vignette that represent the relation between domestic space and spectacle17: This rock at Rio de Janeiro is celebrated.

Around it range the tangled mountains, bathed by the sea.

Palms, banana trees; tropical splendor animates the site.

One stops, one installs one’s armchair.

Crack! a frame all around.

Crack! the four obliques of a perspective. Your room is installed before the site. The whole sea-landscape enters your room.18

First a famous sight, a postcard, a picture. (And it is not by chance that Le Corbusier has not only drawn this landscape from a postcard but has published it alongside the drawings in La Ville radieuse). Then, one inhabits the space in front 50

of that picture, installs an armchair. But this view, this picture, is only constructed at the same time as the house. “Crack! a frame all around it.

Crack! the four obliques of a perspective.” The house is installed before the site, not in the site.

The house is a frame for a view. The window is a gigantic screen.

The repetition of units with windows at slightly different angles, different framings, as happens when this cell becomes a unit in the urban project for Rio de Janeiro, a project which consists on a six-kilometer strip of housing units under a highway on pilotis, suggests again the idea of the movie strip.

Another example of the house represented as a cell for a view appears in Le Corbusier’s book La Ville radieuse, where a sketch represents the house as a cell with a view (figure 12). Here an apartment, high up in the air, is presented as a terminal of telephone, gas, electricity, and water.

The apartment is also provided with “exact air” (heating and ventilation). Inside the apartment there is a small human figure and at the window, a huge eye looking outside. They do not coincide. The apartment itself is here the artifice between the occupant and the exterior world, a camera . The exterior world also becomes artifice; like the air, it has been conditioned, landscaped—it becomes landscape. The apartment defines modern subjectivity with its own eye. The traditional subject can only be the visitor, and as such, a temporary part of the viewing mechanism.

It is precisely in terms of the visitor that Le Corbusier has written about the occupant. For example, about Villa Savoye he writes in ­Précisions: The visitors, till now, turn round and round in the interior, asking themselves what is happening, understanding with difficulties the reasons for what they see and feel; they do not find anything of what is called a house. They feel themselves in something entirely new. And … I do not think they are bored!19

The occupant of Le Corbusier’s house is displaced, first because he is disoriented. He does not know how to place himself in relation to this house. It does not look like a house. Then because the occupant is a visitor. Unlike the occupant of Loos’ houses, both actor and spectator, both involved and detached from the stage, Le Corbusier’s subject is detached from the house with the distance of a visitor, a viewer, a photo­ grapher, a tourist.

In a photograph of the interior of Villa Church, a

casually placed hat and two open books on the table announce that somebody has just been there. A window with the traditional pro- portions of a painting is framed in a way that makes it read also as a screen. In the corner of the room a camera set on a tripod appears. It is the reflection on the mirror of the camera taking the photograph. As viewer of this photograph we are in the position of the photographer, that is, in the position of the camera, because the photographer, as the visitor, has already abandoned the room. The subject (the visitor of the house, the photographer, but also the viewer of this photograph) has already left. The subject in Le Corbusier’s house is estranged and displaced from his own home.

Theater knows necessarily about emplacement, in the traditional sense. It is always about presence.

Both the actor and the spectator are fixed in a continuous space and time, those of the performance. In the shooting of a movie there is no such continuity. The actor’s work is split into a series of discontinuous, mountable episodes. The nature of the illusion for the spectator is a result of the montage.

The subject of Loos’ architecture is the stage actor. But while the center of the house is left empty for the performance, we find the subject occupying the threshold of this space. Undermining its boundaries. The subject is split between actor and spectator of its own play. The completeness of the subject dissolves as also does the wall that s/he is occupying.

The subject of Le Corbusier’s work is the movie actor, “estranged not only from the scene but from his own person.”20 This moment of estrangement is clearly marked in the drawing of La Ville radieuse where the traditional humanist figure, the inhabitant of the house, is made incidental to the camera eye: it comes and goes, it is merely a visitor.

1. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, Paris, 1925, p. 174 2. Ludwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, Der Architekt Adolf Loos, Vienna and Munich, 1964, pp. 130-131 3. Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, in: Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Schocken Books, New York, 1986, p. 154 4. Adolf Loos, Das Andere, no. I, 1903, p. 9 5. Letter from Kurt Ungers to Ludwig Münz, quoted in: Münz and Künstler, Adolf Loos, p. 195 6. Adolf Loos, The Principle of Cladding, 1898, in: Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897–1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith, 1962, p. 66 7. Ibid., p. 66

8. The subject is not only the inhabitant of the space but also the viewer of the photographs, the critic and the architect. See in this respect my article Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interior of Loos, AA Files, no. 20, 1990, pp. 13-14, which develops this point further.

9. For other interpretations of these photographs of Le Corbusier’s villas presented in the Œuvre complète see: Thomas Schumacher, Deep Space, Shallow Space, Architectural Review, January 1987, pp. 37-42; Richard Becherer, Chancing it in the Architecture of Surrealist Mise-en-Scène, Modulus 18, 1987, pp. 63-87; Alexander Gorlin, The Ghost in the Machine: Surrealism in the Work of Le Corbusier, Perspecta 18, 1982; Jose Quetglas, Viajes alrededor de mi alcoba, Arquitecture 264-265, 1987, pp. 111-112 10. A copy of this film is held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. About this movie see J. Ward, Le ­Corbusier’s Villa Les Terrasses and the International Style, Ph. D. dissertation, New York University, 1983, and by the same author, Les Terrasses, Architectural Review, March 1985, pp. 64-69. Richard Becherer has compared it to Man Ray’s movie Les Mystères du Château du Dé (setting by Mallet-Stevens) in: Chancing it in the Architecture of Surrealist Mise-en-Scène.

11. Pierre-Alain Crosset, Eyes Which See, Casabella 531532, 1987, p. 115 12. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, pp. 174-176 13. Pierre Saddy, Le Corbusier e l’Arlecchino, Rassegna 3, 1980 14. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, p. 186 15. Le Corbusier, Présicions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme, Vincent, Freal & Cic., Paris, 1930, pp. 136-138 16. Significantly, Le Corbusier has represented some of his projects, like Villa Meyer and Maison Guiette, in the form of a series of sketches grouped together and representing the perception of the house by a moving eye.

As has been noted, these drawings suggest film story boards, each of the images a still. Lawrence Wright, Perspective in Perspective, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1983, pp. 240-241 17. About the association of the notion of spectacle to that of dwelling, see Hubert Damisch, Les tréteaux de la vie moderne, in: Le Corbusier: une encyclopédie, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987, pp. 252-259. See also Bruno Reichlin, L’Esprit de Paris, Casabella 531532,1987, pp. 52-63 18. Le Corbusier and Pierrefeu, The Home of Man, Architectural Press, London, 1948, p. 87 19. Le Corbusier, Précisions, p. 136 2 0. Pirandello describes the estrangement the actor experiences before the mechanism of the cinematographic camera: “The film actor feels as if in exile—exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice and the noises caused by its moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence.” Luigi Pirandello, Si Gira, quoted by Walter Benjamin in: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in: Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, New York, 1969, p. 229.

Revised version of: Beatriz Colomina, The Split Wall: ­Domestic Voyeurism, first published in: Sexuality and Space, Ed. Beatriz Colomina, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1992, pp. 73-80

51

12. Sketch in La Ville radieuse, 1933

The house is being described in terms of the way it frames the landscape and the effect this framing has on the perception of the house itself by the moving visitor. The house is in the air. There is no front, no back, no side to this house. The house can be in any place. The house is immaterial. That is, the house is not simply constructed as a material object from which, then, certain views become possible. The house is no more than a series of views choreographed by the visitor, the way a filmmaker effects the montage of a film.16 In Rio de Janeiro, Le Corbusier developed a series of drawings in vignette that represent the relation between domestic space and spectacle17: This rock at Rio de Janeiro is celebrated.

Around it range the tangled mountains, bathed by the sea.

Palms, banana trees; tropical splendor animates the site.

One stops, one installs one’s armchair.

Crack! a frame all around.

Crack! the four obliques of a perspective. Your room is installed before the site. The whole sea-landscape enters your room.18

First a famous sight, a postcard, a picture. (And it is not by chance that Le Corbusier has not only drawn this landscape from a postcard but has published it alongside the drawings in La Ville radieuse). Then, one inhabits the space in front 50

of that picture, installs an armchair. But this view, this picture, is only constructed at the same time as the house. “Crack! a frame all around it.

Crack! the four obliques of a perspective.” The house is installed before the site, not in the site.

The house is a frame for a view. The window is a gigantic screen.

The repetition of units with windows at slightly different angles, different framings, as happens when this cell becomes a unit in the urban project for Rio de Janeiro, a project which consists on a six-kilometer strip of housing units under a highway on pilotis, suggests again the idea of the movie strip.

Another example of the house represented as a cell for a view appears in Le Corbusier’s book La Ville radieuse, where a sketch represents the house as a cell with a view (figure 12). Here an apartment, high up in the air, is presented as a terminal of telephone, gas, electricity, and water.

The apartment is also provided with “exact air” (heating and ventilation). Inside the apartment there is a small human figure and at the window, a huge eye looking outside. They do not coincide. The apartment itself is here the artifice between the occupant and the exterior world, a camera . The exterior world also becomes artifice; like the air, it has been conditioned, landscaped—it becomes landscape. The apartment defines modern subjectivity with its own eye. The traditional subject can only be the visitor, and as such, a temporary part of the viewing mechanism.

It is precisely in terms of the visitor that Le Corbusier has written about the occupant. For example, about Villa Savoye he writes in ­Précisions: The visitors, till now, turn round and round in the interior, asking themselves what is happening, understanding with difficulties the reasons for what they see and feel; they do not find anything of what is called a house. They feel themselves in something entirely new. And … I do not think they are bored!19

The occupant of Le Corbusier’s house is displaced, first because he is disoriented. He does not know how to place himself in relation to this house. It does not look like a house. Then because the occupant is a visitor. Unlike the occupant of Loos’ houses, both actor and spectator, both involved and detached from the stage, Le Corbusier’s subject is detached from the house with the distance of a visitor, a viewer, a photo­ grapher, a tourist.

In a photograph of the interior of Villa Church, a

casually placed hat and two open books on the table announce that somebody has just been there. A window with the traditional pro- portions of a painting is framed in a way that makes it read also as a screen. In the corner of the room a camera set on a tripod appears. It is the reflection on the mirror of the camera taking the photograph. As viewer of this photograph we are in the position of the photographer, that is, in the position of the camera, because the photographer, as the visitor, has already abandoned the room. The subject (the visitor of the house, the photographer, but also the viewer of this photograph) has already left. The subject in Le Corbusier’s house is estranged and displaced from his own home.

Theater knows necessarily about emplacement, in the traditional sense. It is always about presence.

Both the actor and the spectator are fixed in a continuous space and time, those of the performance. In the shooting of a movie there is no such continuity. The actor’s work is split into a series of discontinuous, mountable episodes. The nature of the illusion for the spectator is a result of the montage.

The subject of Loos’ architecture is the stage actor. But while the center of the house is left empty for the performance, we find the subject occupying the threshold of this space. Undermining its boundaries. The subject is split between actor and spectator of its own play. The completeness of the subject dissolves as also does the wall that s/he is occupying.

The subject of Le Corbusier’s work is the movie actor, “estranged not only from the scene but from his own person.”20 This moment of estrangement is clearly marked in the drawing of La Ville radieuse where the traditional humanist figure, the inhabitant of the house, is made incidental to the camera eye: it comes and goes, it is merely a visitor.

1. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, Paris, 1925, p. 174 2. Ludwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, Der Architekt Adolf Loos, Vienna and Munich, 1964, pp. 130-131 3. Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, in: Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Schocken Books, New York, 1986, p. 154 4. Adolf Loos, Das Andere, no. I, 1903, p. 9 5. Letter from Kurt Ungers to Ludwig Münz, quoted in: Münz and Künstler, Adolf Loos, p. 195 6. Adolf Loos, The Principle of Cladding, 1898, in: Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897–1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith, 1962, p. 66 7. Ibid., p. 66

8. The subject is not only the inhabitant of the space but also the viewer of the photographs, the critic and the architect. See in this respect my article Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interior of Loos, AA Files, no. 20, 1990, pp. 13-14, which develops this point further.

9. For other interpretations of these photographs of Le Corbusier’s villas presented in the Œuvre complète see: Thomas Schumacher, Deep Space, Shallow Space, Architectural Review, January 1987, pp. 37-42; Richard Becherer, Chancing it in the Architecture of Surrealist Mise-en-Scène, Modulus 18, 1987, pp. 63-87; Alexander Gorlin, The Ghost in the Machine: Surrealism in the Work of Le Corbusier, Perspecta 18, 1982; Jose Quetglas, Viajes alrededor de mi alcoba, Arquitecture 264-265, 1987, pp. 111-112 10. A copy of this film is held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. About this movie see J. Ward, Le ­Corbusier’s Villa Les Terrasses and the International Style, Ph. D. dissertation, New York University, 1983, and by the same author, Les Terrasses, Architectural Review, March 1985, pp. 64-69. Richard Becherer has compared it to Man Ray’s movie Les Mystères du Château du Dé (setting by Mallet-Stevens) in: Chancing it in the Architecture of Surrealist Mise-en-Scène.

11. Pierre-Alain Crosset, Eyes Which See, Casabella 531532, 1987, p. 115 12. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, pp. 174-176 13. Pierre Saddy, Le Corbusier e l’Arlecchino, Rassegna 3, 1980 14. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, p. 186 15. Le Corbusier, Présicions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme, Vincent, Freal & Cic., Paris, 1930, pp. 136-138 16. Significantly, Le Corbusier has represented some of his projects, like Villa Meyer and Maison Guiette, in the form of a series of sketches grouped together and representing the perception of the house by a moving eye.

As has been noted, these drawings suggest film story boards, each of the images a still. Lawrence Wright, Perspective in Perspective, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1983, pp. 240-241 17. About the association of the notion of spectacle to that of dwelling, see Hubert Damisch, Les tréteaux de la vie moderne, in: Le Corbusier: une encyclopédie, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987, pp. 252-259. See also Bruno Reichlin, L’Esprit de Paris, Casabella 531532,1987, pp. 52-63 18. Le Corbusier and Pierrefeu, The Home of Man, Architectural Press, London, 1948, p. 87 19. Le Corbusier, Précisions, p. 136 2 0. Pirandello describes the estrangement the actor experiences before the mechanism of the cinematographic camera: “The film actor feels as if in exile—exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice and the noises caused by its moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence.” Luigi Pirandello, Si Gira, quoted by Walter Benjamin in: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in: Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, New York, 1969, p. 229.

Revised version of: Beatriz Colomina, The Split Wall: ­Domestic Voyeurism, first published in: Sexuality and Space, Ed. Beatriz Colomina, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1992, pp. 73-80

51

*1945 in Salt Lake City, UT, USA Basement Bunker: Painted Queen Small Blue Room, 2003 C-print on aluminium 183 x 122 cm Edition 1/3 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

*1945 in Salt Lake City, UT, USA Basement Bunker: Painted Queen Small Blue Room, 2003 C-print on aluminium 183 x 122 cm Edition 1/3 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Raw Footage Ralph Rugoff

Circus Logic It is peculiarly clownish logic that stumbles and spurts through Paul McCarthy’s Piccadilly Circus (2004) project, at once fueling and structuring its formal production. Neither linear nor vertical, it is a logic that incestuously spirals in on itself and then branches off into root-like arteries and tangents, blind alleys and cul de sacs.

Unexpected breaks and ruptures, reversals and dyslexic inversions, punctuate its operations. Its recurring terms, meanwhile, are concatenated, intertwined, layered. They are also profoundly unstable. Sandwiching contradictions and eroding familiar distinctions, their identity constantly shifts. But though redolent of the ingrown and the ass-backwards, Piccadilly Circus’s clownish logic is nevertheless generative in character. Out of the apparent disorder it engineers arise new and complex perspectives and their attendant pleasures. These include an acute and critical questioning of perceptual norms, a process of reevaluation that requires turning the way we see the world inside out and standing it on its head.

The New World Order In McCarthy’s work, no architectural space is above suspicion, and in Piccadilly Circus, as in many of his earlier installations, the artist engages architectonic structure as a metaphor for the framing and restriction of perception and experience. Bank buildings, of course, stand as an exemplary model of this kind of practice. For all its self-evident lucidity, the architecture of the typical bank is designed to ensure that customers and employees are continually visible to hidden surveillance cameras and the unseen eyes of those who monitor them. Bank architecture thus epitomizes a type of spatial regime in which, as Henri Lefèbvre has argued, vision is trans54

formed into something profoundly duplicitous and in which sight and seeing, once the very sign of intelligibility in Western thought, are turned into a trap. McCarthy springs this trap back on itself.

Where an illusory transparency once reigned, he lays out an optical obstacle course.

Bunker (Boundary Problems) Piccadilly Circus is McCarthy’s first work to be both videotaped and displayed within an existing building. Architecture thus functions here in a variety of ways: as sculptural element, exhibition space, conceptual reference, and film set. And though the six-channel video projection is disorienting—especially as some of the images appear sideways or upside down—it enables us to see the building’s rooms as they used to be. It also allows us to witness the histories of their various transformations. In the process, this multiple projection engineers a ghostly temporal dislocation or delay, haunting the terrain around us with animated memories of its recent past. Our relationship to our physical surroundings—and to the very idea of site—is further complicated by a pair of single-channel video projections that are screened downstairs in the former bank’s vault rooms. Collectively entitled Bunker Basement (2004), the videos present scenes filmed not in London, but on a Los Angeles stage set that loosely reconstructs the bank’s basement, including the very spaces we occupy as spectators. In the Bunker Basement videos, the set serves as a disorienting playground in which the President Bush and Queen Mum figures, usually appearing partly or completely naked, engage in a kind of scatological Grand Guignol, enacting various forms of physical violation and befoulment.

The Raw and the Cooked With Piccadilly Circus’s visceral, almost coarsely tactile imagery, McCarthy also reminds us that one of the powers of art is its ability to disrupt the seamless surface of established culture.

Throughout this work, in fact, the artist seems intent on restoring to images the very qualities that capitalism typically removes. He imbues them with a twitchy complexity, an optical stickiness that makes them difficult to immediately scan and consume. He incorporates within them evidence of both their material production and ghostly decay. These are images, consequently, that interrogate their own boundaries. Rather than merely depict, they function as conceptual peepholes that reveal the flux under static ways of thinking and seeing. This is precisely what Piccadilly Circus’s clownish logic of reversals and dyslexic inversions sets out to achieve. It alienates us from our habitual perceptions in order to provide a necessary critical distance, to engineer a cultural estrangement that might allow us to grasp the utter contingency of our dearest values and beliefs. This is, potentially, a politically significant operation, because without such awareness we remain entrapped within the enclosed and isolated architecture of our self-validating fictions.

Such is the position occupied by fundamentalists of every stripe, including the real-life President Bush and Osama bin Laden, each of whom claims truth as his exclusive possession. From this domineering perspective, what is merely different appears to be unrecognizable, devoid of moral sense, and hence an intolerable evil that has no right to exist.

While Piccadilly Circus turns this kind of perspective inside out, it presents neither false hopes nor wishful idealism. This is not an unduly optimistic work. Instead it offers us the vulnerability of art,

its risky revealing of the fragile underpinnings that buttress our certainties and convictions.

Rather than shy away from the inexplicable and the uncontrollable, it brings them into play as a means of questioning established truths and the ways in which we establish them. McCarthy’s artwork betrays a critical audacity in this regard, all the while insisting that culture is inseparably linked to chaos and struggle. Piccadilly Circus’s ingenious labyrinth of artifice delivers us into the bowels of that struggle, where even our most enduring and solid symbols betray the unconscious forces that rumble and roar within them, and that render them subject to perpetual change.

Excerpt from: Paul McCarthy. Picadilly Circus / Bunker Basement, 2004, Scalo, Zürich, pp. 167-176

55

Raw Footage Ralph Rugoff

Circus Logic It is peculiarly clownish logic that stumbles and spurts through Paul McCarthy’s Piccadilly Circus (2004) project, at once fueling and structuring its formal production. Neither linear nor vertical, it is a logic that incestuously spirals in on itself and then branches off into root-like arteries and tangents, blind alleys and cul de sacs.

Unexpected breaks and ruptures, reversals and dyslexic inversions, punctuate its operations. Its recurring terms, meanwhile, are concatenated, intertwined, layered. They are also profoundly unstable. Sandwiching contradictions and eroding familiar distinctions, their identity constantly shifts. But though redolent of the ingrown and the ass-backwards, Piccadilly Circus’s clownish logic is nevertheless generative in character. Out of the apparent disorder it engineers arise new and complex perspectives and their attendant pleasures. These include an acute and critical questioning of perceptual norms, a process of reevaluation that requires turning the way we see the world inside out and standing it on its head.

The New World Order In McCarthy’s work, no architectural space is above suspicion, and in Piccadilly Circus, as in many of his earlier installations, the artist engages architectonic structure as a metaphor for the framing and restriction of perception and experience. Bank buildings, of course, stand as an exemplary model of this kind of practice. For all its self-evident lucidity, the architecture of the typical bank is designed to ensure that customers and employees are continually visible to hidden surveillance cameras and the unseen eyes of those who monitor them. Bank architecture thus epitomizes a type of spatial regime in which, as Henri Lefèbvre has argued, vision is trans54

formed into something profoundly duplicitous and in which sight and seeing, once the very sign of intelligibility in Western thought, are turned into a trap. McCarthy springs this trap back on itself.

Where an illusory transparency once reigned, he lays out an optical obstacle course.

Bunker (Boundary Problems) Piccadilly Circus is McCarthy’s first work to be both videotaped and displayed within an existing building. Architecture thus functions here in a variety of ways: as sculptural element, exhibition space, conceptual reference, and film set. And though the six-channel video projection is disorienting—especially as some of the images appear sideways or upside down—it enables us to see the building’s rooms as they used to be. It also allows us to witness the histories of their various transformations. In the process, this multiple projection engineers a ghostly temporal dislocation or delay, haunting the terrain around us with animated memories of its recent past. Our relationship to our physical surroundings—and to the very idea of site—is further complicated by a pair of single-channel video projections that are screened downstairs in the former bank’s vault rooms. Collectively entitled Bunker Basement (2004), the videos present scenes filmed not in London, but on a Los Angeles stage set that loosely reconstructs the bank’s basement, including the very spaces we occupy as spectators. In the Bunker Basement videos, the set serves as a disorienting playground in which the President Bush and Queen Mum figures, usually appearing partly or completely naked, engage in a kind of scatological Grand Guignol, enacting various forms of physical violation and befoulment.

The Raw and the Cooked With Piccadilly Circus’s visceral, almost coarsely tactile imagery, McCarthy also reminds us that one of the powers of art is its ability to disrupt the seamless surface of established culture.

Throughout this work, in fact, the artist seems intent on restoring to images the very qualities that capitalism typically removes. He imbues them with a twitchy complexity, an optical stickiness that makes them difficult to immediately scan and consume. He incorporates within them evidence of both their material production and ghostly decay. These are images, consequently, that interrogate their own boundaries. Rather than merely depict, they function as conceptual peepholes that reveal the flux under static ways of thinking and seeing. This is precisely what Piccadilly Circus’s clownish logic of reversals and dyslexic inversions sets out to achieve. It alienates us from our habitual perceptions in order to provide a necessary critical distance, to engineer a cultural estrangement that might allow us to grasp the utter contingency of our dearest values and beliefs. This is, potentially, a politically significant operation, because without such awareness we remain entrapped within the enclosed and isolated architecture of our self-validating fictions.

Such is the position occupied by fundamentalists of every stripe, including the real-life President Bush and Osama bin Laden, each of whom claims truth as his exclusive possession. From this domineering perspective, what is merely different appears to be unrecognizable, devoid of moral sense, and hence an intolerable evil that has no right to exist.

While Piccadilly Circus turns this kind of perspective inside out, it presents neither false hopes nor wishful idealism. This is not an unduly optimistic work. Instead it offers us the vulnerability of art,

its risky revealing of the fragile underpinnings that buttress our certainties and convictions.

Rather than shy away from the inexplicable and the uncontrollable, it brings them into play as a means of questioning established truths and the ways in which we establish them. McCarthy’s artwork betrays a critical audacity in this regard, all the while insisting that culture is inseparably linked to chaos and struggle. Piccadilly Circus’s ingenious labyrinth of artifice delivers us into the bowels of that struggle, where even our most enduring and solid symbols betray the unconscious forces that rumble and roar within them, and that render them subject to perpetual change.

Excerpt from: Paul McCarthy. Picadilly Circus / Bunker Basement, 2004, Scalo, Zürich, pp. 167-176

55

*1969 in Zlaté Moravce, Slovakia I am the Wall, 1999–2006 Spoken word in CD, stereo, sound equipment, headphones Dimensions site specific Edition of 5 Courtesy of the artist I am the Floor, 2007–2008 Woodcut Unlimited Edition of handmade prints on paper Dimensions site specific Courtesy of the artist

*1969 in Zlaté Moravce, Slovakia I am the Wall, 1999–2006 Spoken word in CD, stereo, sound equipment, headphones Dimensions site specific Edition of 5 Courtesy of the artist I am the Floor, 2007–2008 Woodcut Unlimited Edition of handmade prints on paper Dimensions site specific Courtesy of the artist

Notes on Boris Ondreicˇka’s Work I am the Floor Vít Havránek

Why do we have to be fleeing from something in order to talk about emotions?

Writing on a particular piece of art can be like netmaking.

Nets are woven together. People are not machines, which is why texts are hand-woven nets which can, however, contain parts, big or small, woven by someone else, such as quotations or sayings. Using them can be dangerous—if the nets used are stronger than the text I am writing, the stronger parts—the quotations—will break free, because my text will not be able to hold them down. It is also possible to simply make a crafty patchwork of already existing nets.

A net is a context. Text on a concrete piece by Boris Ondreicˇka could be the insertion of this piece into an already existing net. Or perhaps we can begin to create a net around the new pieces we are discussing.

The whole of Boris’ œuvre is hard to interconnect in an interior sense. First of all, no one but him has a complete overview of it—dozens of pieces exist only in his computer. They are secret, concealed, enigmatic and inaccessible.

The visible ones seem like the tips of icebergs; all we can do is speculate—based on our own, personal logic—on what lies hidden underneath the surface. These visible works generate neither a formal nor a content-based identity. This suppression of the visible for the non-existing is typical of him. That is why I think it would be more apt to accent the atmosphere of hiddenness and inaccessibility in his work instead of trying to weave a net around the visible tips of the icebergs.

58

Boris was (and still is) a singer. He obsessively amasses music-related information, like the names of bands, and painstakingly researches the lyrics of dozens, maybe hundreds of bands.

He is fascinated by hollering. Roaring out loud.

Uncontrolled expressions of emotion. Love.

When I am working, when I am in parallel performing two processes—separating things out and naming them, I let my intuition guide me. As I write this text, I am constantly struggling with the issue of language. A subjective intuition that draws a line between what is adequate and what is not prevents me from using the theoretical language I use when I write about art to write about emotions. And that is why I would much rather write a poem instead. But writing a poem instead of this text would be a romantic, subjective way to solve a problem which—I think—obtains objectively. Why should we flee from present-day theoretical concepts and language in order to talk about emotions? I think it is not just a shortcoming proper to me; today, talking straightforwardly and frankly about emotions is tough. Why is it tough? Does it hurt?

Definitely not. All sorts of blogs, websites are swamped with publicly accessible confessions— take YouTube. Confessions have moved from churches to the World Wide Web. We might even say there has been a proliferation of intimate emotions. The hard thing is finding the theoretical concepts, the vocabulary and syntax to talk about emotions. How do I without being hammy, without writing a novel or a poem?

The analytical tools of modern theory do not enable us to talk about emotions; we have to run away from them. We find ourselves in an empty field. In a flowering, fragrant field, filled with 59

Notes on Boris Ondreicˇka’s Work I am the Floor Vít Havránek

Why do we have to be fleeing from something in order to talk about emotions?

Writing on a particular piece of art can be like netmaking.

Nets are woven together. People are not machines, which is why texts are hand-woven nets which can, however, contain parts, big or small, woven by someone else, such as quotations or sayings. Using them can be dangerous—if the nets used are stronger than the text I am writing, the stronger parts—the quotations—will break free, because my text will not be able to hold them down. It is also possible to simply make a crafty patchwork of already existing nets.

A net is a context. Text on a concrete piece by Boris Ondreicˇka could be the insertion of this piece into an already existing net. Or perhaps we can begin to create a net around the new pieces we are discussing.

The whole of Boris’ œuvre is hard to interconnect in an interior sense. First of all, no one but him has a complete overview of it—dozens of pieces exist only in his computer. They are secret, concealed, enigmatic and inaccessible.

The visible ones seem like the tips of icebergs; all we can do is speculate—based on our own, personal logic—on what lies hidden underneath the surface. These visible works generate neither a formal nor a content-based identity. This suppression of the visible for the non-existing is typical of him. That is why I think it would be more apt to accent the atmosphere of hiddenness and inaccessibility in his work instead of trying to weave a net around the visible tips of the icebergs.

58

Boris was (and still is) a singer. He obsessively amasses music-related information, like the names of bands, and painstakingly researches the lyrics of dozens, maybe hundreds of bands.

He is fascinated by hollering. Roaring out loud.

Uncontrolled expressions of emotion. Love.

When I am working, when I am in parallel performing two processes—separating things out and naming them, I let my intuition guide me. As I write this text, I am constantly struggling with the issue of language. A subjective intuition that draws a line between what is adequate and what is not prevents me from using the theoretical language I use when I write about art to write about emotions. And that is why I would much rather write a poem instead. But writing a poem instead of this text would be a romantic, subjective way to solve a problem which—I think—obtains objectively. Why should we flee from present-day theoretical concepts and language in order to talk about emotions? I think it is not just a shortcoming proper to me; today, talking straightforwardly and frankly about emotions is tough. Why is it tough? Does it hurt?

Definitely not. All sorts of blogs, websites are swamped with publicly accessible confessions— take YouTube. Confessions have moved from churches to the World Wide Web. We might even say there has been a proliferation of intimate emotions. The hard thing is finding the theoretical concepts, the vocabulary and syntax to talk about emotions. How do I without being hammy, without writing a novel or a poem?

The analytical tools of modern theory do not enable us to talk about emotions; we have to run away from them. We find ourselves in an empty field. In a flowering, fragrant field, filled with 59

color, where the sun—or the moon—is shining, where it is warm and gets chilly at night. That is a metaphor. Now we find ourselves in the sphere of metaphor. Or in a time of direct expression true the song, of wailing or of roaring out loud. Attempting to analyze the songs of Ian Curtis would be just as absurd.

Theoretical language makes it possible for us to investigate the proliferation of emotions we see in media, in a host of power-based, cultural and social structures. However, in the process of decoding emotions, we deal with them in a way that sublimates them and transforms them, because they get repressed. Emotions themselves—as opposed to their sublimated shadows—appear to be constant in a banal way.

They no longer get named. We know them. They are just understood by themselves. They are not named; they are silenced. And this process of silencing has resulted in this—that we have no vocabulary to talk about them. And it seems to me that in my vision of Boris Ondreicˇka’s invisible iceberg tips, he is looking for a way. He is looking for words, phrases, sentences—for texts that talk about emotions.

61

color, where the sun—or the moon—is shining, where it is warm and gets chilly at night. That is a metaphor. Now we find ourselves in the sphere of metaphor. Or in a time of direct expression true the song, of wailing or of roaring out loud. Attempting to analyze the songs of Ian Curtis would be just as absurd.

Theoretical language makes it possible for us to investigate the proliferation of emotions we see in media, in a host of power-based, cultural and social structures. However, in the process of decoding emotions, we deal with them in a way that sublimates them and transforms them, because they get repressed. Emotions themselves—as opposed to their sublimated shadows—appear to be constant in a banal way.

They no longer get named. We know them. They are just understood by themselves. They are not named; they are silenced. And this process of silencing has resulted in this—that we have no vocabulary to talk about them. And it seems to me that in my vision of Boris Ondreicˇka’s invisible iceberg tips, he is looking for a way. He is looking for words, phrases, sentences—for texts that talk about emotions.

61

*1950 in Gallipolis, OH, USA Arno, 1994 Pair of white marble benches Each 43.2 x 154.2 x 61 cm Edition 4/6 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

*1950 in Gallipolis, OH, USA Arno, 1994 Pair of white marble benches Each 43.2 x 154.2 x 61 cm Edition 4/6 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Tongues Bespoken Gabrielle Cram

In his article Jenny Holzer or Speaking in Tongues* Michael Auping analyzes how Holzer’s texts seem to display a lexical self-portrait, a composite persona in which the artist takes on a number of identities so as to create and offer a possible notion of the self within and in contrast to an environment of revolving stereotypes: “Holzer confidently wraps her language in uncertainty, conspiring to elicit the same uncertainty and tension in the viewer. Pain/pleasure and beautiful/grotesque are the poles between which Holzer’s texts oscillate, generating an intense confrontation with the viewer’s sense of self and truth.” The psychological realities of her writings are not easy to confront, and they appear even more insistent when carved in stone, as in Arno, which consists of poems incised into marble benches, so that the all-too-private, the ineffable is literally and physically inscribed into the space/body. By placing the benches in public realms, Holzer proposes a form of public art provoking public discourse rather than decorating the landscape. The textual works of Holzer ensue the suspicion that there does not exist one single reality, truth and thus identity, as not only the plural title of her work Truisms shows. “At a certain point, what you read in the paper or hear on the television news seems equally real and unreal. But I’m not interested in an interior monologue. The language is a direct response to what is going on the world.” (Jenny Holzer) “She addresses personal issues of identity and conscience in a broad political context, creating extremely poignant, at times, almost surreal, conjunctions between the two.” (Michael Auping) The rhythmic poems of Arno that playfully repeat and vary their wording and thereby constantly create juxtapositions within, illustrate a certain non-reliance and non-acceptance of singularity and at

the same time seem to secretly hint at the origin of such distrust. “[…] —You are the one who did this to me. —You are my own. —I show you. —I feel you. —I ask you. —I don’t ask. —I don’t wait.

—I won’t ask you. —I can’t tell you. —I lie. […]”

The phrases express and put on display feelings of hate, love, obsession, rage, anxiety, uncertainty, etc, of which the reader doesn’t know the source but assumes a relation to fear of or actual loss and/or painful love. The unintelligible utterances seem to stem from the individual’s non-understanding and non-capability of articulation, the alienation from the own self. “In recent years, Holzer’s texts have also become increasingly personal, evoking a tone and imagery that suggests a thin edge between the objective and what verges on the hallucinatory.” (Michael Auping) The consciously chosen media/languages not only offer possible forms of expression of the non-effable but simultaneously touch upon and propose a concept of the unspeakable and disclose the conceptual approach of Holzer’s artistic practice. * Glossolalia is commonly called “speaking in tongues”.

For other uses of “speaking in tongues”, see Speaking in Tongues (disambiguation). Glossolalia (from Greek glossa γλῶσσα “tongue, language” and λαλεῖν “to talk”) is the vocalizing of fluent speech-like but unintelligible utterances, often as part of religious practice. Its use (including use in this article) sometimes also embraces Xenoglossy—speaking in a natural language that was previously unknown to and that is not understood by the speaker. While occurrences of glossolalia are widespread and well documented, there is considerable discussion as to both its status and its source.

Written along Michael Auping’s text: Reading Holzer or Speaking in Tongues, in: Jenny Holzer. The Venice Installation, Ed. Karen Lee Spaulding, The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Buffalo, 1990

65

Tongues Bespoken Gabrielle Cram

In his article Jenny Holzer or Speaking in Tongues* Michael Auping analyzes how Holzer’s texts seem to display a lexical self-portrait, a composite persona in which the artist takes on a number of identities so as to create and offer a possible notion of the self within and in contrast to an environment of revolving stereotypes: “Holzer confidently wraps her language in uncertainty, conspiring to elicit the same uncertainty and tension in the viewer. Pain/pleasure and beautiful/grotesque are the poles between which Holzer’s texts oscillate, generating an intense confrontation with the viewer’s sense of self and truth.” The psychological realities of her writings are not easy to confront, and they appear even more insistent when carved in stone, as in Arno, which consists of poems incised into marble benches, so that the all-too-private, the ineffable is literally and physically inscribed into the space/body. By placing the benches in public realms, Holzer proposes a form of public art provoking public discourse rather than decorating the landscape. The textual works of Holzer ensue the suspicion that there does not exist one single reality, truth and thus identity, as not only the plural title of her work Truisms shows. “At a certain point, what you read in the paper or hear on the television news seems equally real and unreal. But I’m not interested in an interior monologue. The language is a direct response to what is going on the world.” (Jenny Holzer) “She addresses personal issues of identity and conscience in a broad political context, creating extremely poignant, at times, almost surreal, conjunctions between the two.” (Michael Auping) The rhythmic poems of Arno that playfully repeat and vary their wording and thereby constantly create juxtapositions within, illustrate a certain non-reliance and non-acceptance of singularity and at

the same time seem to secretly hint at the origin of such distrust. “[…] —You are the one who did this to me. —You are my own. —I show you. —I feel you. —I ask you. —I don’t ask. —I don’t wait.

—I won’t ask you. —I can’t tell you. —I lie. […]”

The phrases express and put on display feelings of hate, love, obsession, rage, anxiety, uncertainty, etc, of which the reader doesn’t know the source but assumes a relation to fear of or actual loss and/or painful love. The unintelligible utterances seem to stem from the individual’s non-understanding and non-capability of articulation, the alienation from the own self. “In recent years, Holzer’s texts have also become increasingly personal, evoking a tone and imagery that suggests a thin edge between the objective and what verges on the hallucinatory.” (Michael Auping) The consciously chosen media/languages not only offer possible forms of expression of the non-effable but simultaneously touch upon and propose a concept of the unspeakable and disclose the conceptual approach of Holzer’s artistic practice. * Glossolalia is commonly called “speaking in tongues”.

For other uses of “speaking in tongues”, see Speaking in Tongues (disambiguation). Glossolalia (from Greek glossa γλῶσσα “tongue, language” and λαλεῖν “to talk”) is the vocalizing of fluent speech-like but unintelligible utterances, often as part of religious practice. Its use (including use in this article) sometimes also embraces Xenoglossy—speaking in a natural language that was previously unknown to and that is not understood by the speaker. While occurrences of glossolalia are widespread and well documented, there is considerable discussion as to both its status and its source.

Written along Michael Auping’s text: Reading Holzer or Speaking in Tongues, in: Jenny Holzer. The Venice Installation, Ed. Karen Lee Spaulding, The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Buffalo, 1990

65

67

67

*1957 in Brussels, Ontario, Canada The Walk Book, 2005 Edited by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, in collaboration with Public Art Fund, New York

*1957 in Brussels, Ontario, Canada The Walk Book, 2005 Edited by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, in collaboration with Public Art Fund, New York

Intimacy. A Thin Layer of Deception Between Us Mirjam Schaub / Janet Cardiff

Intriguingly intimate Please call Lynn at 244-2730 “When is close too close?” the New Gallery in Alberta, Canada asked in May 1992. The question was printed in white type on a black background at the bottom of their invitation to the exhibition Intimacies. A three-day investigation into the nature of, desire for and boundaries of intimacy in 1992. “Artists Janet Cardiff, Charles Cousins, Nelson Henricks and John Winet are asking you to help them explore intimacy by participating in a one-on-one, twenty minute private and confidential conversation. […] For additional information, and to schedule an appointment, please call Lynn at 244-2730.”

Janet: When you’re with someone constantly you don’t really see them. It’s only when they go away that you feel their absence like a hole in your chest.1

View from window, Grindrod, BC 2005 Photo for special limited edition of The Walk Book pp. 68-69: In Real Time, 1999, Video walk, Curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn for the 53rd Carnegie International at Carnegie Library. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA

Curiously, at the same time when Sennett published his broad critique of culture and society that “denies even to Eros a public dimension,”5 a movement was developing in the art scenes of New York and Paris, in which artists began to reveal the aesthetic dimension of intimacy. Long before reality TV gave Sennett’s claims a certain notoriety, artists were trying to move the bounds of social acceptability and exploring a new everyday life. The boundaries of social conformity ensured that the everyday life that was regarded as dull and uninteresting did not have a place in the discourses of science and art. These artists focused on the privatization of the public and the public exposure of the private. The movement grew quietly with more women artists becoming involved, yet it met little response for a long time. Two of the most colorful personalities, Sophie Calle and Linda Montano, are taken as representatives.

In Janet Cardiff’s walks, certain basic characteristics suggest intimacy from the outset: breath“Without consistent emotional cleansing and ing, footsteps, and the character and proximity of maintenance we are often blind to or incapable of the voice. The objective of establishing closeness healthy intimacy.”6 casually plays with what Richard Sennett denounces as the “tyranny of intimacy” in his book Since the 1960s, the endurance artist Linda The Fall of Public Man. In the modern present, Montano has consistently sought to erase dishe writes, “to know oneself” is no longer “a tinctions between art and life in her performancmeans through which one knows the world.” Ines. She has created over 50 major performances, stead, “[w]e have tried to make the fact of being written six books, amongst them, Art in Everyday in private, alone with ourselves and with family Life, and established the Life/Art Institute in and intimate friends, an end in itself.”2 Sennett Kingston, New York. In 1974 Montano began givmaintains that it is not intimacy per se that is the ing walking tours of San Francisco and became a problem. The desire for warmth, affection, and work that was later entitled The Rose Mountain trust that is characteristic of intimacy as well Walking Club. Janet Cardiff describes Montano as the wish to reveal our innermost feelings to as a source of inspiration. While today Montano other people and enjoy anxiety- and sanctionis most famous for her marathon performances, free encounters only begin to cause difficulties such as the 1983–84 Rope Piece. It entailed that when “these psychological benefits”3 are sought she and Tehching Hsieh were tied together by a in more public realms of experience and are 2½ meter-long rope for an entire year without inevitably disappointed. being allowed to touch each other. However, it was probably Montano’s early and comparatively “The 1970s were right for the 1970s not right unspectacular pieces, which influenced Cardiff. for now.”4 71

Intimacy. A Thin Layer of Deception Between Us Mirjam Schaub / Janet Cardiff

Intriguingly intimate Please call Lynn at 244-2730 “When is close too close?” the New Gallery in Alberta, Canada asked in May 1992. The question was printed in white type on a black background at the bottom of their invitation to the exhibition Intimacies. A three-day investigation into the nature of, desire for and boundaries of intimacy in 1992. “Artists Janet Cardiff, Charles Cousins, Nelson Henricks and John Winet are asking you to help them explore intimacy by participating in a one-on-one, twenty minute private and confidential conversation. […] For additional information, and to schedule an appointment, please call Lynn at 244-2730.”

Janet: When you’re with someone constantly you don’t really see them. It’s only when they go away that you feel their absence like a hole in your chest.1

View from window, Grindrod, BC 2005 Photo for special limited edition of The Walk Book pp. 68-69: In Real Time, 1999, Video walk, Curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn for the 53rd Carnegie International at Carnegie Library. Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA

Curiously, at the same time when Sennett published his broad critique of culture and society that “denies even to Eros a public dimension,”5 a movement was developing in the art scenes of New York and Paris, in which artists began to reveal the aesthetic dimension of intimacy. Long before reality TV gave Sennett’s claims a certain notoriety, artists were trying to move the bounds of social acceptability and exploring a new everyday life. The boundaries of social conformity ensured that the everyday life that was regarded as dull and uninteresting did not have a place in the discourses of science and art. These artists focused on the privatization of the public and the public exposure of the private. The movement grew quietly with more women artists becoming involved, yet it met little response for a long time. Two of the most colorful personalities, Sophie Calle and Linda Montano, are taken as representatives.

In Janet Cardiff’s walks, certain basic characteristics suggest intimacy from the outset: breath“Without consistent emotional cleansing and ing, footsteps, and the character and proximity of maintenance we are often blind to or incapable of the voice. The objective of establishing closeness healthy intimacy.”6 casually plays with what Richard Sennett denounces as the “tyranny of intimacy” in his book Since the 1960s, the endurance artist Linda The Fall of Public Man. In the modern present, Montano has consistently sought to erase dishe writes, “to know oneself” is no longer “a tinctions between art and life in her performancmeans through which one knows the world.” Ines. She has created over 50 major performances, stead, “[w]e have tried to make the fact of being written six books, amongst them, Art in Everyday in private, alone with ourselves and with family Life, and established the Life/Art Institute in and intimate friends, an end in itself.”2 Sennett Kingston, New York. In 1974 Montano began givmaintains that it is not intimacy per se that is the ing walking tours of San Francisco and became a problem. The desire for warmth, affection, and work that was later entitled The Rose Mountain trust that is characteristic of intimacy as well Walking Club. Janet Cardiff describes Montano as the wish to reveal our innermost feelings to as a source of inspiration. While today Montano other people and enjoy anxiety- and sanctionis most famous for her marathon performances, free encounters only begin to cause difficulties such as the 1983–84 Rope Piece. It entailed that when “these psychological benefits”3 are sought she and Tehching Hsieh were tied together by a in more public realms of experience and are 2½ meter-long rope for an entire year without inevitably disappointed. being allowed to touch each other. However, it was probably Montano’s early and comparatively “The 1970s were right for the 1970s not right unspectacular pieces, which influenced Cardiff. for now.”4 71

These works deal with the development of an individual voice, which always involves the entire body. The following is a small list of some of her works with brief descriptions.

Listening to the ’80s, Inside and Out (1980), a 12-hour event consisting of sitting, walking, and singing all her sins from the balcony of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Learning to Talk, a video piece from 1976, in which Montano explores her personalities as “a chance to learn how to talk.”

Drum Event from the same year, in which Montano and Nina Wise drummed for 6 hours a day for 6 days, with the aim of changing their awareness using sound.

Talking about Sex While Under Hypnosis (1974), in which a hypnotist asked Montano questions about her sex life and she answered under hypnosis. The tape was first shown at the University of California, Davis.

The Story of My Life (1973). Here Montano walked on a treadmill for three hours while telling the story of her life. “A smile device kept me smiling.” (San Francisco Art Institute) “Intuition is a good friend. Irony is sometimes better.”7 Janet: Sometimes I take pictures of my husband when he’s sleeping. It’s the one-sided gaze that attracts me, the freedom for me to digest his naked body, from whatever angle, his helpless being at the mercy of my lens. It’s also the attraction of watching someone be unconscious, lost in another world. It’s like I’m trying to get back to the safety and vulnerability of sleep through him. It’s hard to explain. Words are so pathetic sometimes.8 Many of Sophie Calle’s artworks function similarly as social interventions disguised as personal experiments. They attempt to breach the boundary between public and private, shame and shamelessness, sensitivity and insensitivity with targeted, media-based interventions.

Some example include following strangers with a camera or publishing interviews with people listed in a stranger’s address book in the Libération newspaper. Like few other artists, Calle has transformed the museum into a place where the intimate and the private are involuntarily exposed 72

to the public. In 1979, from around 5 p.m. on Sunday, April 1, until around 9 a.m. on Tuesday, April 9, the artist invited friends, but also strangers, in total 28 different dormeurs, to come to her home, sleep in her bed, and be photographed by her while they slept. As compensation she made them breakfast.

What is everyone trying to do when they are photographing? Perhaps it’s about connection to a place or a person, but it’s also our separation from them.

While Sophie Calle uses words, photography, and other devices to reveal and observe the nature of intimacy, Cardiff is more concerned with facilitating a genuine (if temporary) sense of intimacy between artist and viewer. Irony, situational humor, wit, and a suspicion of possible contradiction enliven Cardiff’s soundtracks and give her listeners the freedom to make up their own minds about what they hear. Due to the speaker’s somewhat indifferent tone of voice, a sense of intimacy is created within a few steps. She appeals to our powers of imagination, which are linked to both our fears as well as our desires.

They are voices that have no physical counterpart are ideal for all kinds of projections.

In my walks you often have the situation where two people are separated by media. This leads to a sort of dislocation through time and space. Drogan’s Nightmare is very much a love story, about my voice and George’s voice.

Probably a lot of the pieces are love stories, about George’s and my love story. About the separation between people and using media as a metaphor for that separation, and how our ability to completely immerse ourselves in each other echoes as a perfect analogy for how we are immersed in but separated by media. Also, it gets echoed in this person you’re listening to, who is part of you, but separate from you, so there is this continual cyclical repetition and layering.

The comic poet, Aristophanes, appears in Plato’s Symposium in order to explain why the human desire that is generated by separation is so strong. He claims that originally, humans had a different shape, namely, they appeared as a round, ball-like form. They moved around either by walking upright or rolling. The sexes had not yet been separated. Instead, each ball either

contained both sexes or were same-sex beings, and it made it possible for the two sexes to gaze upon, embrace and penetrate one another constantly. In the end, Zeus found the ball-shaped beings too insolent, and he separated them “as you might divide an egg with a hair.”9 Since then, according to Aristophanes, every person is looking for his other half “After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart […]. [S]o ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two […]. Each of us when separated […] is always looking for his other half.”10 In addition to the feeling of loneliness that grows out of a crowd of competing voices, there is a specific form of attentiveness, an eroticism of distance, which grows out of the experience of being separated by media.

The intimacy created by the walks is a safe intimacy because of the separation through media.

I see it as a cyborg relationship, like the Borgs in Star Trek, where the Discman and headset are a part of you. The voice gives you instructions but makes you feel like a part of another person with another person’s memories. But the question for me is, where is this voice? It’s in the listener’s mind and in the digital information, but it also creates a third person, a third world, a mixture between listener and my voice.

Is a minimal amount of medial separation required to create a tolerable proximity? “A thin layer of deception between us,” as it is termed in the Louisiana Walk? It is a closeness that does not aim to completely close the natural gap between bodies and sexes, but rather, it is an evanescent form of closeness that engages our imagination and, preserves a minimal degree of freedom and distance. Because only the voice is present in Cardiff’s works, it not only unleashes the imagination in accordance with the pleasure principle, it also suspends our consciousness of reality. It enables a form of closeness that goes beyond the traditional game of one-on-one, that

expectant—and often rather helpless—state of gazing into one another’s eyes interminably, comparable only to the dreamy, somnambulistic state in which the approaching presence of another person can be felt even with eyes closed.

Just to be able to close your eyes and open your ears, to follow the game of light and shadow through finely veined eyelids. Simple things like this constitute Cardiff’s particular form of minimalism.

From the very beginning, her approach has demonstrated an astute and highly dialectical understanding of the first distinct natural media, namely, our five senses. They must be addressed separately in order to broaden the scope and heighten the experience they provide. Separation is a necessary step towards this new shared experience.

Janet: I remember my first trip to NYC when I was a student. It was in the winter. There were people standing in front of fires, all bundled in rags and blankets. It was like out of some post apocalyptic science fiction movie. I wonder where they all went? Sfx of children on rock up high. One is yelling at other to get down.

Janet: I remember dancing with a young businessman from the mid-west, and then him taking me to his hotel room so he could show me his vibrator bed. He showed me his bed then he walked me back to my hotel. That was all. I guess he was pretty disappointed. I can’t believe how naïve I was. She seems like a different person then but somehow I have her memories. From Her Long Black Hair 1. A Large Slow River, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, 2000 2. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Penguin Books, London, 2002, 4 3. Sennett 5 4. Linda Montano, Chakra Story. www.bobsart.org/ montano/story/text3.html (accessed April 29, 2005) 5. Sennett 9 6. Montano, Chakra Story 7. Montano 8. Her Long Black Hair, Public Art Fund, Central Park, New York, 2004 9. Plato, Symposium, trans. Benjamin Jowett, quotation from: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html ­(accessed April 29, 2005) 10. Plato, Symposium

Excerpt from: Mirjam Schaub / Janet Cardiff, Intimacy.

A thin Layer of Deception between us, in: Janet Cardiff, The Walk Book, Ed. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, in collaboration with Public Art Fund, New York, 2005, pp. 185-195

73

These works deal with the development of an individual voice, which always involves the entire body. The following is a small list of some of her works with brief descriptions.

Listening to the ’80s, Inside and Out (1980), a 12-hour event consisting of sitting, walking, and singing all her sins from the balcony of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Learning to Talk, a video piece from 1976, in which Montano explores her personalities as “a chance to learn how to talk.”

Drum Event from the same year, in which Montano and Nina Wise drummed for 6 hours a day for 6 days, with the aim of changing their awareness using sound.

Talking about Sex While Under Hypnosis (1974), in which a hypnotist asked Montano questions about her sex life and she answered under hypnosis. The tape was first shown at the University of California, Davis.

The Story of My Life (1973). Here Montano walked on a treadmill for three hours while telling the story of her life. “A smile device kept me smiling.” (San Francisco Art Institute) “Intuition is a good friend. Irony is sometimes better.”7 Janet: Sometimes I take pictures of my husband when he’s sleeping. It’s the one-sided gaze that attracts me, the freedom for me to digest his naked body, from whatever angle, his helpless being at the mercy of my lens. It’s also the attraction of watching someone be unconscious, lost in another world. It’s like I’m trying to get back to the safety and vulnerability of sleep through him. It’s hard to explain. Words are so pathetic sometimes.8 Many of Sophie Calle’s artworks function similarly as social interventions disguised as personal experiments. They attempt to breach the boundary between public and private, shame and shamelessness, sensitivity and insensitivity with targeted, media-based interventions.

Some example include following strangers with a camera or publishing interviews with people listed in a stranger’s address book in the Libération newspaper. Like few other artists, Calle has transformed the museum into a place where the intimate and the private are involuntarily exposed 72

to the public. In 1979, from around 5 p.m. on Sunday, April 1, until around 9 a.m. on Tuesday, April 9, the artist invited friends, but also strangers, in total 28 different dormeurs, to come to her home, sleep in her bed, and be photographed by her while they slept. As compensation she made them breakfast.

What is everyone trying to do when they are photographing? Perhaps it’s about connection to a place or a person, but it’s also our separation from them.

While Sophie Calle uses words, photography, and other devices to reveal and observe the nature of intimacy, Cardiff is more concerned with facilitating a genuine (if temporary) sense of intimacy between artist and viewer. Irony, situational humor, wit, and a suspicion of possible contradiction enliven Cardiff’s soundtracks and give her listeners the freedom to make up their own minds about what they hear. Due to the speaker’s somewhat indifferent tone of voice, a sense of intimacy is created within a few steps. She appeals to our powers of imagination, which are linked to both our fears as well as our desires.

They are voices that have no physical counterpart are ideal for all kinds of projections.

In my walks you often have the situation where two people are separated by media. This leads to a sort of dislocation through time and space. Drogan’s Nightmare is very much a love story, about my voice and George’s voice.

Probably a lot of the pieces are love stories, about George’s and my love story. About the separation between people and using media as a metaphor for that separation, and how our ability to completely immerse ourselves in each other echoes as a perfect analogy for how we are immersed in but separated by media. Also, it gets echoed in this person you’re listening to, who is part of you, but separate from you, so there is this continual cyclical repetition and layering.

The comic poet, Aristophanes, appears in Plato’s Symposium in order to explain why the human desire that is generated by separation is so strong. He claims that originally, humans had a different shape, namely, they appeared as a round, ball-like form. They moved around either by walking upright or rolling. The sexes had not yet been separated. Instead, each ball either

contained both sexes or were same-sex beings, and it made it possible for the two sexes to gaze upon, embrace and penetrate one another constantly. In the end, Zeus found the ball-shaped beings too insolent, and he separated them “as you might divide an egg with a hair.”9 Since then, according to Aristophanes, every person is looking for his other half “After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart […]. [S]o ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two […]. Each of us when separated […] is always looking for his other half.”10 In addition to the feeling of loneliness that grows out of a crowd of competing voices, there is a specific form of attentiveness, an eroticism of distance, which grows out of the experience of being separated by media.

The intimacy created by the walks is a safe intimacy because of the separation through media.

I see it as a cyborg relationship, like the Borgs in Star Trek, where the Discman and headset are a part of you. The voice gives you instructions but makes you feel like a part of another person with another person’s memories. But the question for me is, where is this voice? It’s in the listener’s mind and in the digital information, but it also creates a third person, a third world, a mixture between listener and my voice.

Is a minimal amount of medial separation required to create a tolerable proximity? “A thin layer of deception between us,” as it is termed in the Louisiana Walk? It is a closeness that does not aim to completely close the natural gap between bodies and sexes, but rather, it is an evanescent form of closeness that engages our imagination and, preserves a minimal degree of freedom and distance. Because only the voice is present in Cardiff’s works, it not only unleashes the imagination in accordance with the pleasure principle, it also suspends our consciousness of reality. It enables a form of closeness that goes beyond the traditional game of one-on-one, that

expectant—and often rather helpless—state of gazing into one another’s eyes interminably, comparable only to the dreamy, somnambulistic state in which the approaching presence of another person can be felt even with eyes closed.

Just to be able to close your eyes and open your ears, to follow the game of light and shadow through finely veined eyelids. Simple things like this constitute Cardiff’s particular form of minimalism.

From the very beginning, her approach has demonstrated an astute and highly dialectical understanding of the first distinct natural media, namely, our five senses. They must be addressed separately in order to broaden the scope and heighten the experience they provide. Separation is a necessary step towards this new shared experience.

Janet: I remember my first trip to NYC when I was a student. It was in the winter. There were people standing in front of fires, all bundled in rags and blankets. It was like out of some post apocalyptic science fiction movie. I wonder where they all went? Sfx of children on rock up high. One is yelling at other to get down.

Janet: I remember dancing with a young businessman from the mid-west, and then him taking me to his hotel room so he could show me his vibrator bed. He showed me his bed then he walked me back to my hotel. That was all. I guess he was pretty disappointed. I can’t believe how naïve I was. She seems like a different person then but somehow I have her memories. From Her Long Black Hair 1. A Large Slow River, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, 2000 2. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, Penguin Books, London, 2002, 4 3. Sennett 5 4. Linda Montano, Chakra Story. www.bobsart.org/ montano/story/text3.html (accessed April 29, 2005) 5. Sennett 9 6. Montano, Chakra Story 7. Montano 8. Her Long Black Hair, Public Art Fund, Central Park, New York, 2004 9. Plato, Symposium, trans. Benjamin Jowett, quotation from: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html ­(accessed April 29, 2005) 10. Plato, Symposium

Excerpt from: Mirjam Schaub / Janet Cardiff, Intimacy.

A thin Layer of Deception between us, in: Janet Cardiff, The Walk Book, Ed. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, in collaboration with Public Art Fund, New York, 2005, pp. 185-195

73

* 1976 / 1975 both in Innsbruck, Austria The Bag, 1997 Bags and color photographs Courtesy of the artists

* 1976 / 1975 both in Innsbruck, Austria The Bag, 1997 Bags and color photographs Courtesy of the artists

The Bag Emanuel Danesch / David Rych

Perceptions of space in the urban context are described with antecedents like public, accessible, open or urban. In combination with the word space these phrases basically represent an attempt to describe spatial perception as collective.

This reductive terminology does not, however, acknowledge the use that different publics and their protagonists make, or could make, of such spaces.

The uses that can be made of public space are very wide ranging. In premodern public space the subject had a broad range of interactive possibilities available. Services and manufacturing were to be found side-by-side with homes in the metropolitan centre. This mix of work, leisure and home was characterized by a very diverse and locally orientated social structure. The paradigmatic modern shift with the accompanying rapid increase in personal mobility made new demands on public space. Housing was relocated to the outskirts of conurbations, leading to a loss of a key part of the social fabric. In a further development a large proportion of workplaces also moved to the outskirts. However this happened without re-establishing a network between housing, work and social interaction—with jobs moving to separate industrial zones and factories.

This development radically changed public space as a political and discursive arena. A broad mix of protagonists were active in premodern street life with its public spaces and marketplaces. Having a large number of points of contact was part of the average daily experience for a wide range of city dwellers.

This social structure changed into a publicized life with public spaces being designated clearly defined functions, leading to segregation. Locations could be used in a variety of ways by premodern city dwellers, and created possibili-

ties for active use and even for the unforeseen to happen. Since the advent of the modern age, however, spaces are being created specifically to fulfill clearly predefined functions, where only a predetermined radius of activity is possible within a tight framework. This applies to every sphere of public life: every major shopping centre is equipped with entertainment and catering zones; open spaces accessible to the public are not generally planned to take the functioning of social life into consideration but according to criteria dominated by market forces, their usability and the quality of their representational character. At the same time consumption-free zones are disappearing from the publicly accessible domain. Privatized spaces with different and opaque criteria for exclusion effectively demand adherence to a fixed codex from their potential customers—as a ticket in, so to speak.

Furthermore, the urban fabric is apparently becoming unsafe and so it is being transformed into a controlled environment under blanket video surveillance: a dictatorship of unseen gazes. Everybody is potentially to be visible everywhere at anytime—hidden spaces are increasingly disappearing at the same time as hiding oneself is increasingly being perceived as a subversive or criminal act. Parallel to this development, functions in public space are blurring with those in the media sector, where new social spaces are opening up. Virtual worlds compete with gravitation.

Freedom of action is being inhibited with the loss of public spaces, as are free expression and the profoundly human requirement to participate in the world, i.e. to use public space temporarily in a range of ways. The public arena is vanishing while the remaining locations and spaces have been stripped of their social purpose.

77

The Bag Emanuel Danesch / David Rych

Perceptions of space in the urban context are described with antecedents like public, accessible, open or urban. In combination with the word space these phrases basically represent an attempt to describe spatial perception as collective.

This reductive terminology does not, however, acknowledge the use that different publics and their protagonists make, or could make, of such spaces.

The uses that can be made of public space are very wide ranging. In premodern public space the subject had a broad range of interactive possibilities available. Services and manufacturing were to be found side-by-side with homes in the metropolitan centre. This mix of work, leisure and home was characterized by a very diverse and locally orientated social structure. The paradigmatic modern shift with the accompanying rapid increase in personal mobility made new demands on public space. Housing was relocated to the outskirts of conurbations, leading to a loss of a key part of the social fabric. In a further development a large proportion of workplaces also moved to the outskirts. However this happened without re-establishing a network between housing, work and social interaction—with jobs moving to separate industrial zones and factories.

This development radically changed public space as a political and discursive arena. A broad mix of protagonists were active in premodern street life with its public spaces and marketplaces. Having a large number of points of contact was part of the average daily experience for a wide range of city dwellers.

This social structure changed into a publicized life with public spaces being designated clearly defined functions, leading to segregation. Locations could be used in a variety of ways by premodern city dwellers, and created possibili-

ties for active use and even for the unforeseen to happen. Since the advent of the modern age, however, spaces are being created specifically to fulfill clearly predefined functions, where only a predetermined radius of activity is possible within a tight framework. This applies to every sphere of public life: every major shopping centre is equipped with entertainment and catering zones; open spaces accessible to the public are not generally planned to take the functioning of social life into consideration but according to criteria dominated by market forces, their usability and the quality of their representational character. At the same time consumption-free zones are disappearing from the publicly accessible domain. Privatized spaces with different and opaque criteria for exclusion effectively demand adherence to a fixed codex from their potential customers—as a ticket in, so to speak.

Furthermore, the urban fabric is apparently becoming unsafe and so it is being transformed into a controlled environment under blanket video surveillance: a dictatorship of unseen gazes. Everybody is potentially to be visible everywhere at anytime—hidden spaces are increasingly disappearing at the same time as hiding oneself is increasingly being perceived as a subversive or criminal act. Parallel to this development, functions in public space are blurring with those in the media sector, where new social spaces are opening up. Virtual worlds compete with gravitation.

Freedom of action is being inhibited with the loss of public spaces, as are free expression and the profoundly human requirement to participate in the world, i.e. to use public space temporarily in a range of ways. The public arena is vanishing while the remaining locations and spaces have been stripped of their social purpose.

77

The Bag is the first collaborative project by Emanuel Danesch and David Rych. The outer skin of The Bag isolates the person within from the outer world while rendering the user completely anonymous. As soon as users adopt the squatting position determined by shape they can immediately become vulnerable but nevertheless effective and provocative objects of passive resistance. Experiments in the public arena have shown that in a crowd the schematic human outline of The Bag is perceived as an obstacle, and is carefully avoided.

This stirred the idea to serialize the manufacture of a product whose primary function was the individual nomadic occupation of space.

Inspired by portable functionalist designs in the avant-garde architecture of the 1960s, such as outdoor gear as an urban dress code—with the symbolic idea of survival in the concrete ­jungle—the primary concern was with adaptation in a society constantly on the move. Private space is being reduced to the dimensions of a garment.

Accordingly, inspired by the sleeping bag, a garment has been developed that slips on easily to serve as a cocoon for the immediate creation of a minimal private realm.

The photographs of the exhibition show a prototype of The Bag and the finished product, a fashion accessory that engages critically with the notion of brand fetishism and its social function.

Translated from the German by Jonathan Quinn

79

The Bag is the first collaborative project by Emanuel Danesch and David Rych. The outer skin of The Bag isolates the person within from the outer world while rendering the user completely anonymous. As soon as users adopt the squatting position determined by shape they can immediately become vulnerable but nevertheless effective and provocative objects of passive resistance. Experiments in the public arena have shown that in a crowd the schematic human outline of The Bag is perceived as an obstacle, and is carefully avoided.

This stirred the idea to serialize the manufacture of a product whose primary function was the individual nomadic occupation of space.

Inspired by portable functionalist designs in the avant-garde architecture of the 1960s, such as outdoor gear as an urban dress code—with the symbolic idea of survival in the concrete ­jungle—the primary concern was with adaptation in a society constantly on the move. Private space is being reduced to the dimensions of a garment.

Accordingly, inspired by the sleeping bag, a garment has been developed that slips on easily to serve as a cocoon for the immediate creation of a minimal private realm.

The photographs of the exhibition show a prototype of The Bag and the finished product, a fashion accessory that engages critically with the notion of brand fetishism and its social function.

Translated from the German by Jonathan Quinn

79

*1949 in Zagreb, Croatia Triangle, 1979 4 b/w photographs (each 51.2 x 61.3 x 4.2 cm) and 1 concept sheet Edition 2/5 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

*1949 in Zagreb, Croatia Triangle, 1979 4 b/w photographs (each 51.2 x 61.3 x 4.2 cm) and 1 concept sheet Edition 2/5 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Interview with Sanja Ivekovic´ Barbara Horvath

Hi, my name is Sanja Ivekovic´, and I was born— no secret—in 1949 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, but now I live in Zagreb, Croatia.

Could you please explain the origin of the work, its context, and how it was conceived?

Well, I started my artistic activity around the seventies. Actually I had my first exhibition in 1971 and belong to the generation of so-called conceptual art. So I have done and am still doing works in different media: photography, performance (maybe a little less performance these days), installation, video. This piece was done in 1979. It’s a performance that I did on the balcony of my own apartment, which is in the center of the city of Zagreb. In these four photographs you can see me on the balcony. You can see that it happens at a time when the former president of Yugoslavia, Marshall Tito, was coming to town, so as usual he was driving in his limousine with his wife, and the crowd was waving and cheering on the street. This is the shot I made from my balcony, so you can see the Yugoslav flag here, and you can see the policemen. A number of them were always placed around the area for security reasons. My apartment is across the street; there is this big hotel—it’s called Westin today and was called Hotel International during Communism—and when this particular event was happening, there would always be one or two security guys on the rooftop.

had a cigarette, a bottle of whiskey, a T-shirt, and a book, and I performed masturbation and was of course not paying attention to anything—this big event—that was happening on the street.

And after a few minutes, actually exactly eighteen minutes, there was the doorbell in my apartment, and there was a policemen saying that I should be not allowed, that I should … The exact sentence was “Persons and objects are to be removed from the balcony!” So obviously the link was established. Because of the cement barrier of my balcony, no one could actually see me, except for the person on the roof.

At that time feminist art was not very popular, especially not in Yugoslavia, and I’d say it was one of the very first works that had a very conscious feminist perspective. It was one of the first performances in which a woman was actually provoking a male gaze, and of course it’s about power and a person who is under control, and in this case it was a woman.

So is it important for you to have this special hanging order?

Yes, I always exhibit this work like this. If you think about it, it’s quite logical, because you have pictures, images of power: down, in the middle, and on the top. And me, I am the person who has to be removed from the order; so it’s shifted a little bit, it’s in between.

So I was interested in finding out if we could make a link—that’s why it’s called Triangle: me and the policemen on the street, who were obviously in contact by walkie-talkie with the guys on the roof. My performance actually consisted of the following: I put my chair on the balcony, and I 83

Interview with Sanja Ivekovic´ Barbara Horvath

Hi, my name is Sanja Ivekovic´, and I was born— no secret—in 1949 in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, but now I live in Zagreb, Croatia.

Could you please explain the origin of the work, its context, and how it was conceived?

Well, I started my artistic activity around the seventies. Actually I had my first exhibition in 1971 and belong to the generation of so-called conceptual art. So I have done and am still doing works in different media: photography, performance (maybe a little less performance these days), installation, video. This piece was done in 1979. It’s a performance that I did on the balcony of my own apartment, which is in the center of the city of Zagreb. In these four photographs you can see me on the balcony. You can see that it happens at a time when the former president of Yugoslavia, Marshall Tito, was coming to town, so as usual he was driving in his limousine with his wife, and the crowd was waving and cheering on the street. This is the shot I made from my balcony, so you can see the Yugoslav flag here, and you can see the policemen. A number of them were always placed around the area for security reasons. My apartment is across the street; there is this big hotel—it’s called Westin today and was called Hotel International during Communism—and when this particular event was happening, there would always be one or two security guys on the rooftop.

had a cigarette, a bottle of whiskey, a T-shirt, and a book, and I performed masturbation and was of course not paying attention to anything—this big event—that was happening on the street.

And after a few minutes, actually exactly eighteen minutes, there was the doorbell in my apartment, and there was a policemen saying that I should be not allowed, that I should … The exact sentence was “Persons and objects are to be removed from the balcony!” So obviously the link was established. Because of the cement barrier of my balcony, no one could actually see me, except for the person on the roof.

At that time feminist art was not very popular, especially not in Yugoslavia, and I’d say it was one of the very first works that had a very conscious feminist perspective. It was one of the first performances in which a woman was actually provoking a male gaze, and of course it’s about power and a person who is under control, and in this case it was a woman.

So is it important for you to have this special hanging order?

Yes, I always exhibit this work like this. If you think about it, it’s quite logical, because you have pictures, images of power: down, in the middle, and on the top. And me, I am the person who has to be removed from the order; so it’s shifted a little bit, it’s in between.

So I was interested in finding out if we could make a link—that’s why it’s called Triangle: me and the policemen on the street, who were obviously in contact by walkie-talkie with the guys on the roof. My performance actually consisted of the following: I put my chair on the balcony, and I 83

A Person as an Archive’s Function Aristide Antonas

The Fall of the Absolute Secret We may soon talk—some do already—about a change in the concept of secrecy and its meaning in culture nowadays: a change that could be understood if we confront it through two extreme, radically opposed examples depicting an imaginary passage from one concept of the secret to another1; two different conditions, through which a secret becomes important while included in an archive, define this text. The two types of archiving I am referring to do not necessarily belong to any specific period. Each one radicalizes a concept for the secret. We may obtain a concrete idea about the first type of secret if we refer to the archive work traditionally undertaken by many states’ secret services: secret information is collected in order to prevent so-called “illegal actions”. We consider the dynamics of the absolute secret—the “top secret” character attributed to these archived files—a sign of weakness installed in the state mechanism’s center. The revelation of such secrets usually denotes a major failure of the system. Entering any personal space through data collected from the secret services already provides a way to understand how one’s personal life could be of interest to a state system. It also shows which weakness rules this particular revelation of the secret. The second example that I bring up here has to do with a different way of archiving a person’s life: for the requirements of this text I will consider the Internet an open archive. A rhetorical power of “no concealment” is linked to the Internet rationale.

I will try to create a double function of the abstract person described by the two different archive conditions. I could argue that a shift as regards the possibility and the condition of a secret and its political value may be clearly traced through this comparison. This shift implies the 84

collapse of secrecy and leads to a different projection of the personal factor and its inner space in the political sphere.

One could propose a political-psychological formula which would relate the quantity of secret information to the faith of the citizens in their political system: the more the need for secret information at the center of the system grew, the more the system would display an increasingly authoritarian and correctional character; the more it would tend to become totalitarian; and the more vulnerable and shallow its power would become. This authority, which may, at first sight, appear classical, raises questions and exhibits complications if it is examined at the two different archive moments I choose. The two types of archiving substantiate a transformation in the way the individual functions when “included” in an archive. In order to see the complications and the questions I refer to, we need only construct the concept of “residing in the archive”2 and consider that—first of all—the surveillance archives reserved a compulsory residence of this kind for a citizen. We will also need to approach the present-day moment of the—usually voluntary—registration of data on the Internet as another kind of “residence in the archive.”

A Classical Secret Place When the secret services open a file, they operate according to the logic of an organizational fear: the fear of an unforeseen strike, conspiracy, mutiny. The archive is the collection created by the eye of the system and residing in it realizes a centrally supervised society where this fear of the state reigns.

I think the power of the secret archive is captured at the precise moment the secret space is plundered and I will insist on this particular mo-

ment. Living under supervision means coexisting with the prospect that the secret entries will be read. A vehement proscribed reading is always already installed in any surveillance archive. This unattainable reading exists as the creator of the surveillance condition. Residing in the archive is, in this case, an abstract condition and it dominates society’s imaginary without the archive ever having to reveal its presence beyond certain indications. The archival mechanism substantiates the everyday in a transcendent way: supervision records and remembers. A citizen’s any given action may constitute a wrong step which will lead to complications if included in this undesirable compilation.

Here “remaining in the archive” is identified with the possibility of this particular imaginary revelation. It denotes a belonging to this revelation. Any possible present is haunted by the anticipated moment when the archives will be opened. The former Eastern Bloc societies and the dictatorships of the West give a good account of the permanence of this extreme situation in everyday life. The condition of concealment required by the secret archive glorifies, from the outset, the opening of the archive and the collapse of secrecy. A reading of the archive’s entries, after this opening, is not a mere accident for the secret archive. It is its innate dramatic event and it forms the secret archive’s constitutive narrative power: the opening of the archive is equivalent to the social narrative itself but also to the end of this narrative. The narrative’s construction depends on never seeing the archive; all it takes is for the door to the archive to open in order for the narrative to end. This door (its surface, its hinges and its key) rules the narrative of the hidden and this hidden room is, concurrently, the work, the archive and the narrative. It condenses the form and the content of betrayal. The opening of this space means betrayal.

The concept of betrayal is defined by this violation of an obscure terrible space. As such, the betrayal is always double: the secret existence of the enclosed room hides a second secret, which is much more powerful in narrative terms.

The collapse of this double secret inaugurates a double betrayal. Entrance into the archive’s space is forbidden and the secret archive’s rule is betrayed upon entry. But this unauthorized unsealing of the door, this destructive curiosity forms only the frame for a desired reading. The

archive room contains a double betrayal. But its hidden secrets abolish the frame of the room and nullify the transgression. Their reading installs a single ethical perspective regarding the betrayal and a particular future for those who infringe on the archive. At the same time, it also sets up the likelihood for the unwanted visitor to reside among the archive’s corpses3. One may consider that opening the forbidden door of the STASI discharged this narrative power.

The evidence contained in the secret archive tends to be interpreted one-dimensionally as specific evidence of betrayal. This archive is not the kind that served simple functions but rather which serves, in an icy manner, functions that are forbidden: the archive is organized along with the hypothesis of its concealment. It is a confidential archive, not because it contains information that will expose those who are listed in it, but because, through the opening of the archive, through its revelation, that which is exposed is the spirit which organizes the archive.

This spirit is identified with the spirit of betrayal created by the archivist. The organization of the archive is carried out according to the method of secret services, by a systematic classification of documents which are secretly amassed: without the knowledge of those who constitute the archive’s targets, and without the knowledge of those who do not constitute the archive’s targets. Any publicizing of the existence of the archive puts in danger its very rationale which is to survive beyond the actual filing; to save itself while its idea of survival is the dominance of the general rule that manages to preserve the secret. A certain authority that monitors the archive, guards it as if there were no question of its possible overthrowing, since its overthrowing demolishes an important part of the system’s exterior image. The archive exists with the certainty of the longevity of a hidden, threatening secret.

Concealment is marked by yet another development which does not escape us. The authority that files the document is also the one that asks and constructs the document in its univocal reading. Something is obscured in order to achieve or to avoid a certain situation. That, for the sake of which something was concealed, clearly forms a multi-leveled world that must remain hidden. It forms an exclusion in the interior, it makes the room, the door and the prohibition of entry. It’s not surprising that the word archive 85

A Person as an Archive’s Function Aristide Antonas

The Fall of the Absolute Secret We may soon talk—some do already—about a change in the concept of secrecy and its meaning in culture nowadays: a change that could be understood if we confront it through two extreme, radically opposed examples depicting an imaginary passage from one concept of the secret to another1; two different conditions, through which a secret becomes important while included in an archive, define this text. The two types of archiving I am referring to do not necessarily belong to any specific period. Each one radicalizes a concept for the secret. We may obtain a concrete idea about the first type of secret if we refer to the archive work traditionally undertaken by many states’ secret services: secret information is collected in order to prevent so-called “illegal actions”. We consider the dynamics of the absolute secret—the “top secret” character attributed to these archived files—a sign of weakness installed in the state mechanism’s center. The revelation of such secrets usually denotes a major failure of the system. Entering any personal space through data collected from the secret services already provides a way to understand how one’s personal life could be of interest to a state system. It also shows which weakness rules this particular revelation of the secret. The second example that I bring up here has to do with a different way of archiving a person’s life: for the requirements of this text I will consider the Internet an open archive. A rhetorical power of “no concealment” is linked to the Internet rationale.

I will try to create a double function of the abstract person described by the two different archive conditions. I could argue that a shift as regards the possibility and the condition of a secret and its political value may be clearly traced through this comparison. This shift implies the 84

collapse of secrecy and leads to a different projection of the personal factor and its inner space in the political sphere.

One could propose a political-psychological formula which would relate the quantity of secret information to the faith of the citizens in their political system: the more the need for secret information at the center of the system grew, the more the system would display an increasingly authoritarian and correctional character; the more it would tend to become totalitarian; and the more vulnerable and shallow its power would become. This authority, which may, at first sight, appear classical, raises questions and exhibits complications if it is examined at the two different archive moments I choose. The two types of archiving substantiate a transformation in the way the individual functions when “included” in an archive. In order to see the complications and the questions I refer to, we need only construct the concept of “residing in the archive”2 and consider that—first of all—the surveillance archives reserved a compulsory residence of this kind for a citizen. We will also need to approach the present-day moment of the—usually voluntary—registration of data on the Internet as another kind of “residence in the archive.”

A Classical Secret Place When the secret services open a file, they operate according to the logic of an organizational fear: the fear of an unforeseen strike, conspiracy, mutiny. The archive is the collection created by the eye of the system and residing in it realizes a centrally supervised society where this fear of the state reigns.

I think the power of the secret archive is captured at the precise moment the secret space is plundered and I will insist on this particular mo-

ment. Living under supervision means coexisting with the prospect that the secret entries will be read. A vehement proscribed reading is always already installed in any surveillance archive. This unattainable reading exists as the creator of the surveillance condition. Residing in the archive is, in this case, an abstract condition and it dominates society’s imaginary without the archive ever having to reveal its presence beyond certain indications. The archival mechanism substantiates the everyday in a transcendent way: supervision records and remembers. A citizen’s any given action may constitute a wrong step which will lead to complications if included in this undesirable compilation.

Here “remaining in the archive” is identified with the possibility of this particular imaginary revelation. It denotes a belonging to this revelation. Any possible present is haunted by the anticipated moment when the archives will be opened. The former Eastern Bloc societies and the dictatorships of the West give a good account of the permanence of this extreme situation in everyday life. The condition of concealment required by the secret archive glorifies, from the outset, the opening of the archive and the collapse of secrecy. A reading of the archive’s entries, after this opening, is not a mere accident for the secret archive. It is its innate dramatic event and it forms the secret archive’s constitutive narrative power: the opening of the archive is equivalent to the social narrative itself but also to the end of this narrative. The narrative’s construction depends on never seeing the archive; all it takes is for the door to the archive to open in order for the narrative to end. This door (its surface, its hinges and its key) rules the narrative of the hidden and this hidden room is, concurrently, the work, the archive and the narrative. It condenses the form and the content of betrayal. The opening of this space means betrayal.

The concept of betrayal is defined by this violation of an obscure terrible space. As such, the betrayal is always double: the secret existence of the enclosed room hides a second secret, which is much more powerful in narrative terms.

The collapse of this double secret inaugurates a double betrayal. Entrance into the archive’s space is forbidden and the secret archive’s rule is betrayed upon entry. But this unauthorized unsealing of the door, this destructive curiosity forms only the frame for a desired reading. The

archive room contains a double betrayal. But its hidden secrets abolish the frame of the room and nullify the transgression. Their reading installs a single ethical perspective regarding the betrayal and a particular future for those who infringe on the archive. At the same time, it also sets up the likelihood for the unwanted visitor to reside among the archive’s corpses3. One may consider that opening the forbidden door of the STASI discharged this narrative power.

The evidence contained in the secret archive tends to be interpreted one-dimensionally as specific evidence of betrayal. This archive is not the kind that served simple functions but rather which serves, in an icy manner, functions that are forbidden: the archive is organized along with the hypothesis of its concealment. It is a confidential archive, not because it contains information that will expose those who are listed in it, but because, through the opening of the archive, through its revelation, that which is exposed is the spirit which organizes the archive.

This spirit is identified with the spirit of betrayal created by the archivist. The organization of the archive is carried out according to the method of secret services, by a systematic classification of documents which are secretly amassed: without the knowledge of those who constitute the archive’s targets, and without the knowledge of those who do not constitute the archive’s targets. Any publicizing of the existence of the archive puts in danger its very rationale which is to survive beyond the actual filing; to save itself while its idea of survival is the dominance of the general rule that manages to preserve the secret. A certain authority that monitors the archive, guards it as if there were no question of its possible overthrowing, since its overthrowing demolishes an important part of the system’s exterior image. The archive exists with the certainty of the longevity of a hidden, threatening secret.

Concealment is marked by yet another development which does not escape us. The authority that files the document is also the one that asks and constructs the document in its univocal reading. Something is obscured in order to achieve or to avoid a certain situation. That, for the sake of which something was concealed, clearly forms a multi-leveled world that must remain hidden. It forms an exclusion in the interior, it makes the room, the door and the prohibition of entry. It’s not surprising that the word archive 85

initially meant “a house, a residence, an address, were not already suspecting. However, what is the abode of the highest-ranking noblemen, those emphasized here is the change, and indeed the that commanded”4. The same secret evidence is change that arises as the onset of the inauguraorganized as a concave space of exclusion but is tion of the period needed for the healing of the read as such only when it is conquered and rewound: betrayal and the secret archive space veals, through an explosion of unimaginable force, are constructing a wound. According to Derrida: the thing it is hiding in its interior. It is then pos- “The archive never surrenders … during a visionsible to read instantly, not only the content that ary commemorative act which would rekindle, substantiates the traumatic revelation, but also alive, innocent or neutral, the origin of an event”5. the systematic, coolly organized deception perpe- Perhaps it does not surrender and it certainly trated by both the concealment and the content. does not rekindle an innocent or neutral origin; And the authority that monitors the archive lies furthermore the archive of a betrayal is ideal for installed in a despicable way in the interior of a one to realize how a univocal reading constructs structure that has been made in order to receive an illusionary, live duration, at the moment when and exclude the one it awaits inside it: the authe archive’s time of reference has certainly thority that monitors the archive has betrayed elapsed. The archive of betrayal installs a new everything that lies outside the archive so as to time and that is its deeper narrative work: the construct this secret interior for itself. tracing of betrayal organizes, using even the Significance is attached to the treacherous instal- tiniest details, the new treacherous regions for lation, as well as to its examination in every detail the time of the secret, extending the reading of that organizes it. The treacherous installation is betrayal to an absurd malice without limits. The significant; so is the scrutiny of every one of its problem with betrayal is that it always contains organizing elements. Significance is also attached a reason at its core and it is always confined by to taking a stand in the interior of this archive as limits. Its immorality is not due so much to an taking a stand against mendacity and immoraloverstepping of limits but to the underestimaity, in a time when mendacity and immorality no tion of the presence of the betrayed. Some kind longer cause any disturbance as value mechaof non-existence of the other is always being nisms: in the contemporary West, people converse constructed at the core of every treacherous act. without being scandalized by mendacity and they Based on the evidence of betrayal, the archive no longer seek the moral element the way they constructs a time which did not exist but now used to. Nevertheless, the archival of betrayal installs itself as the time of the plan of betrayal truly scandalizes and creates the image of a revwhich is now necessarily distorted from the place elation in an era with no time for revelations. The of observation that is set up in space after the archival of betrayal nods towards the region of a betrayal, after the opening of the secret space. certain elusive faith in a certain morality.

The imaginary residence in the secret services archive is founded in strong, dramatic, narrative Betrayal creates Intimacy structures: betrayal, wound, oblivion, forgiveness, The secret archives construct an old narrativity, revenge, covering up, all these constitute imporreminiscent of the drama of fairy tales. I maintain tant concepts for the description of time which that state authority avoids narrativity more and is organized around the explosive opening of the more. If we agree, as I am suggesting here, that secret archives. Even when they are closed, even the powerful structure of supervision constructas they remain hidden, the secret archives of the ed some sort of imaginary residence in the artraditional Western European countries—though chive, the moment of recognition and opening of they may not grow to such a scale as to have the the secret archive substantiates and sheds new entire population under surveillance—may still light on the formation of the modern dictatorexhibit the living basis for the dramas that might ships’ societies within the aim taken by the secret unfold in the sphere of politics. They are imporservices. The moment at which the archives are tant works in progress, even the most despised opened may be symbolic, constituting the one among them: each one has its own particular great moment of a dictatorial regime’s collapse. narrative and political interest.

The revelation of the secret archives did not In order to describe societies that were organbring to light something unheard of, which we ized and functioned for decades based on the 86

rationale of secret surveillance and under the shadow of the intelligence services, I employ the phrase residing in the archive. The person under surveillance was always potentially inside the archive, which might be documenting him against his will. An archival function of the person and of the concept of personal space is proposed through this description: being observed and watched in secret correspond to a specific construction of personal space and to its particular projection to communal life.

Politics for an Open Archive It has been already more than twenty years since the appearance of the first hypertext browser and the first www application. Something which had been in preparation for a long time is, therefore, creating a residence condition inside the Internet. On the Internet or in the Western world, we can talk, in different terms, about a certain literality of residing in the archive; about new self functions and different ways to appear in private places and in public areas under deployment. The commitment to this residence is, this time, usually voluntary. There is no obvious eye (at least not today), monitoring citizens on the Internet, though their communications have taken on forms that can be digitally entered and filed. No major wound, no betrayal, no revenge and no forgiveness in this account of self exposition.

The impression of openness and the rhetoric of randomness play a decisive part in the formation of the Internet. But there’s also something more going on: according to Derrida: “There is no archive without a locus of documentation, without a technique of repetition and without a certain externality. There is no archive without an outside”6.

If the Internet is termed an archive or an archive of archives, it should be emphasized that it is presented without a place of documentation and, possibly (which constitutes this essay’s working hypothesis), without an outside. Based on these traits, it continues to organize itself like a special archive. What also makes the Internet a distinctive archive is the fact that its size seems to be practically limitless, not so much because it is constantly growing, but because its scale reverses, within the social imaginary, the concept of limitation to which Derrida referred. Its swelling allows us to observe it in a different way.

The intellectual scope of the Internet appears

in the reversal of the concepts of interior and exterior. Its interior structure constructs a possible exterior world. The post-Internet world is organized on an imaginary level as just such a warehouse and as a series of versions for every single thing. Concreteness is at risk: every single thing is an entry open to the addition of new information. Residing in the archive, I form the world as structured by entries. Thus, for once, we can conceive the idea that nothing exists beyond the archive. The testimony of existence is the presence in the archive. Furthermore: something general or specific exists if it can take the form of an entry or if it has already been entered that way: the difference is of no particular significance here7. Existence is identified with recordability.

So we may be moving on from the illness of the archive, which Jacques Derrida called the mal d’archive, to another archival syndrome of this era, which arises this time from the particular condition of the intellectual confinement in the archive, in which the condition of the Internet unfolds. We don’t need to perceive this passage as an event registered on a certain historicity.

Derrida used the term mal d’archive to describe the incessant search for an archive where the archive is hidden; the desire to return to origin could be for him already archival. Nostalgia for the return to the locus of the absolute beginning was, according to the description of mal d’ archive, the particular element that constituted the archive internally.

In order to describe the syndrome of confinement in the archive which organizes a large part of modern-day reality, we will have to accept that—for reasons still undetectable—this conservative mania for the return to the origin, by virtue of which Derrida formulated the mal d’archive, can be considered ended and senseless when living, without anxiety, between the entries and data of the hyper-archive of the Internet and the rationale according to which it is organized today. A certain stability of the data entered relegates any movement towards origin to a position of lesser importance. That is to say, we can consider that the quest for origin, which (besides the conservative reflex of metaphysical thought) might develop based on a post-Freudian unfolding of curiosity8, is obliterated inside the multi-entry rationale according to which the Internet archive is constructed internally: if an 87

initially meant “a house, a residence, an address, were not already suspecting. However, what is the abode of the highest-ranking noblemen, those emphasized here is the change, and indeed the that commanded”4. The same secret evidence is change that arises as the onset of the inauguraorganized as a concave space of exclusion but is tion of the period needed for the healing of the read as such only when it is conquered and rewound: betrayal and the secret archive space veals, through an explosion of unimaginable force, are constructing a wound. According to Derrida: the thing it is hiding in its interior. It is then pos- “The archive never surrenders … during a visionsible to read instantly, not only the content that ary commemorative act which would rekindle, substantiates the traumatic revelation, but also alive, innocent or neutral, the origin of an event”5. the systematic, coolly organized deception perpe- Perhaps it does not surrender and it certainly trated by both the concealment and the content. does not rekindle an innocent or neutral origin; And the authority that monitors the archive lies furthermore the archive of a betrayal is ideal for installed in a despicable way in the interior of a one to realize how a univocal reading constructs structure that has been made in order to receive an illusionary, live duration, at the moment when and exclude the one it awaits inside it: the authe archive’s time of reference has certainly thority that monitors the archive has betrayed elapsed. The archive of betrayal installs a new everything that lies outside the archive so as to time and that is its deeper narrative work: the construct this secret interior for itself. tracing of betrayal organizes, using even the Significance is attached to the treacherous instal- tiniest details, the new treacherous regions for lation, as well as to its examination in every detail the time of the secret, extending the reading of that organizes it. The treacherous installation is betrayal to an absurd malice without limits. The significant; so is the scrutiny of every one of its problem with betrayal is that it always contains organizing elements. Significance is also attached a reason at its core and it is always confined by to taking a stand in the interior of this archive as limits. Its immorality is not due so much to an taking a stand against mendacity and immoraloverstepping of limits but to the underestimaity, in a time when mendacity and immorality no tion of the presence of the betrayed. Some kind longer cause any disturbance as value mechaof non-existence of the other is always being nisms: in the contemporary West, people converse constructed at the core of every treacherous act. without being scandalized by mendacity and they Based on the evidence of betrayal, the archive no longer seek the moral element the way they constructs a time which did not exist but now used to. Nevertheless, the archival of betrayal installs itself as the time of the plan of betrayal truly scandalizes and creates the image of a revwhich is now necessarily distorted from the place elation in an era with no time for revelations. The of observation that is set up in space after the archival of betrayal nods towards the region of a betrayal, after the opening of the secret space. certain elusive faith in a certain morality.

The imaginary residence in the secret services archive is founded in strong, dramatic, narrative Betrayal creates Intimacy structures: betrayal, wound, oblivion, forgiveness, The secret archives construct an old narrativity, revenge, covering up, all these constitute imporreminiscent of the drama of fairy tales. I maintain tant concepts for the description of time which that state authority avoids narrativity more and is organized around the explosive opening of the more. If we agree, as I am suggesting here, that secret archives. Even when they are closed, even the powerful structure of supervision constructas they remain hidden, the secret archives of the ed some sort of imaginary residence in the artraditional Western European countries—though chive, the moment of recognition and opening of they may not grow to such a scale as to have the the secret archive substantiates and sheds new entire population under surveillance—may still light on the formation of the modern dictatorexhibit the living basis for the dramas that might ships’ societies within the aim taken by the secret unfold in the sphere of politics. They are imporservices. The moment at which the archives are tant works in progress, even the most despised opened may be symbolic, constituting the one among them: each one has its own particular great moment of a dictatorial regime’s collapse. narrative and political interest.

The revelation of the secret archives did not In order to describe societies that were organbring to light something unheard of, which we ized and functioned for decades based on the 86

rationale of secret surveillance and under the shadow of the intelligence services, I employ the phrase residing in the archive. The person under surveillance was always potentially inside the archive, which might be documenting him against his will. An archival function of the person and of the concept of personal space is proposed through this description: being observed and watched in secret correspond to a specific construction of personal space and to its particular projection to communal life.

Politics for an Open Archive It has been already more than twenty years since the appearance of the first hypertext browser and the first www application. Something which had been in preparation for a long time is, therefore, creating a residence condition inside the Internet. On the Internet or in the Western world, we can talk, in different terms, about a certain literality of residing in the archive; about new self functions and different ways to appear in private places and in public areas under deployment. The commitment to this residence is, this time, usually voluntary. There is no obvious eye (at least not today), monitoring citizens on the Internet, though their communications have taken on forms that can be digitally entered and filed. No major wound, no betrayal, no revenge and no forgiveness in this account of self exposition.

The impression of openness and the rhetoric of randomness play a decisive part in the formation of the Internet. But there’s also something more going on: according to Derrida: “There is no archive without a locus of documentation, without a technique of repetition and without a certain externality. There is no archive without an outside”6.

If the Internet is termed an archive or an archive of archives, it should be emphasized that it is presented without a place of documentation and, possibly (which constitutes this essay’s working hypothesis), without an outside. Based on these traits, it continues to organize itself like a special archive. What also makes the Internet a distinctive archive is the fact that its size seems to be practically limitless, not so much because it is constantly growing, but because its scale reverses, within the social imaginary, the concept of limitation to which Derrida referred. Its swelling allows us to observe it in a different way.

The intellectual scope of the Internet appears

in the reversal of the concepts of interior and exterior. Its interior structure constructs a possible exterior world. The post-Internet world is organized on an imaginary level as just such a warehouse and as a series of versions for every single thing. Concreteness is at risk: every single thing is an entry open to the addition of new information. Residing in the archive, I form the world as structured by entries. Thus, for once, we can conceive the idea that nothing exists beyond the archive. The testimony of existence is the presence in the archive. Furthermore: something general or specific exists if it can take the form of an entry or if it has already been entered that way: the difference is of no particular significance here7. Existence is identified with recordability.

So we may be moving on from the illness of the archive, which Jacques Derrida called the mal d’archive, to another archival syndrome of this era, which arises this time from the particular condition of the intellectual confinement in the archive, in which the condition of the Internet unfolds. We don’t need to perceive this passage as an event registered on a certain historicity.

Derrida used the term mal d’archive to describe the incessant search for an archive where the archive is hidden; the desire to return to origin could be for him already archival. Nostalgia for the return to the locus of the absolute beginning was, according to the description of mal d’ archive, the particular element that constituted the archive internally.

In order to describe the syndrome of confinement in the archive which organizes a large part of modern-day reality, we will have to accept that—for reasons still undetectable—this conservative mania for the return to the origin, by virtue of which Derrida formulated the mal d’archive, can be considered ended and senseless when living, without anxiety, between the entries and data of the hyper-archive of the Internet and the rationale according to which it is organized today. A certain stability of the data entered relegates any movement towards origin to a position of lesser importance. That is to say, we can consider that the quest for origin, which (besides the conservative reflex of metaphysical thought) might develop based on a post-Freudian unfolding of curiosity8, is obliterated inside the multi-entry rationale according to which the Internet archive is constructed internally: if an 87

entry on the Internet is organized as a series of diverse data entered, this does not simply draw attention to a structure that responds to search engines the expansion of the function of the entry has already formed a way of perceiving things.

The object is identified by a series of versions of itself, the personal space by a collection of data.

Within this democratic conception of the object and of the self, concreteness will be redefined while the idea of anxiety concerning depth, which explains the state of things at any given time, is already being mourned.

Residing in the archive today nullifies, in this perspective, the anxiety about origin which constituted the description of the archive according to Derrida. The data entry depends on an entry, not on some elusive, vague origin it may have. Every entry of data functions on a multi-entry level, it arrives at the archive formed as a total of entries, and it can change, and a new one can be added to the same entry.

I described a wounding caused by the opening of the secret archives, the treacherous dynamics of residing in the particular archives and the conditions of social supervision carried out by intelligence services. Next to this residence I construct the schema of a different residence, in a different archive.

On the Internet, a momentum is displayed in terms of the archive: let us describe it through the same wiki logic, but also through the pointing out of so many data repositories, which, through a certain mental geotagging, chart the map of the world as a grouping of its different versions.

Here, in a juxtaposition structure where no opposition, no conflict seems structurally possible, nothing appears dramatic.

The space of the archive of the secret services, seen through a modern-day perspective, appears extremely old and obsolete. But is it? It doesn’t really matter. Perhaps that which could take on political value is precisely this imaginary transformation of the rationale of the archive within the new syndrome of archival confinement that I am trying to describe. This confinement, is, moreover, presented at the outset as a realistic possibility for the removal of any confinement. In its interior there are no dramatic tensions. Its narratives are flaccid. The terrible disasters that open up rooms of betrayal and forgiveness, the concepts of the secret, appear in its interior either as laughable or as old and nullified. The 88

revelations in the condition of the contemporary residence in the archive are carried out in obviousness. The secret itself is submerged in obviousness and the syndrome of confinement introduces us to a certain populization of the secrets of Lacan’s purloined letter9. The secret services are working for authority, authority is granted religious sanctity. But how can one stand before authorities that are enforced through the use of the syndrome of confinement in the archive,10 i.e. through the use of the invisible presence that allows this syndrome, or through intrusion in what was, until today, considered a domestic space?

Isn’t the undisturbed juxtaposition of any one of their active structures lost alongside inert structures while questioning it? The plethora nullifies the difference and the hierarchy between entries.

Any alternative proposal marks just another proposition.11 Thus, the significance of opposition, dispute and conflict is lost in the interior of the archive. Opposition contained within the archive is not, structurally speaking, opposition any more.

The panoptical world of versions constructed during the development of the archive’s confinement syndrome dedramatizes reality. Narrative dynamics are burned within the exposition of different versions: the short narrative reigns and thus there is no betrayal that cannot be recovered from. An archive of betrayal deserves condemnation, war against a certain obviousness of evil. The question concerning the continuation of political vigilance is that it can function within the conditions of this blinding from the viewing brought on by the particular condition of residing in the archive. Within the archive, political weighing cannot circumvent the fact that—in terms of structure, for the forming of today’s world— nothing is left that deserves utter faith: the risk is for one to imagine ways towards a subversive political stance in the interior of the condition of residing in the archive.

The contemporary person remains constantly busy, concentrating keenly on distinctive mnemonic pockets to which he surrender without faith. Outside of these, all that exist are other similar ones. We will remain for quite some time in the condition of the archive syndrome I am describing. A kind of post-event, organized in a different way than Badiou12 imagined, is under formation. The internal denerving of the event using the rationale of the version suspends the meaning and intensity of any action. The event

is always rendered not specific enough. In an analogous sense the house and the private space seek new meanings. And what remains excluded from any possibility of entering an archive shows a possible research area. The future of politics could be a way to penetrate and inhabit the archive.

The shift from a limited personal space to an unconstrained one carries the weight of this extreme transformation of the secret imaginary as encountered here. We describe a change in a function of the archive, namely the person. Even if some have not experienced the terror of residing inside a military or a police secret archive, even if life within the Internet condition continues to remain an unrealized condition, we can understand what different strategies towards public space tend to be present in societies of involuntary or voluntary submission of the self to an archive, and which combined conditions may be created in the intervening space. In this transformation the person is different while he now confronts open space in a different way and is expected to act in it differently. The person also becomes different as he devises other types of stratagems in order to invent enclosed, protected areas in this condition.

1. Two parallel readings are proposed here: Georg ­Simmel’s text on the secret where Simmel writes about the formation of sociability from a secret in Secret et Sociétés secrètes, (French Translation, Circé, Paris, 1996), and the last period of Jacques Derrida’s work on secret. Cf. e.g. his text The Gift of Death or his series of dialogues with Maurizio Ferraris A Taste for the Secret. Derrida gave the title “the secret” to many of his last seminars; he sometimes mentioned he had decided to keep “the secret” as a permanent seminar title.

2. Some of the ideas presented here are proposed in Residing in Archives, a text written as part of the project Monument to Transformation.

3. I refer here to archived corpses, thinking of a typical betrayal space such as Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard: the opening of the secret room in this text is described as a passage from darkness to light: “At first she saw nothing, because the windows were closed ; after a few moments she began to see that the floor was all covered in curdled blood and that in the blood were reflected the bodies of several dead women hanging along the walls”. In only a few words, the narrative energy of the story is vented. But we can nevertheless claim that the story was organized in the anticipation of and the mourning for this phrase. The phrase which describes the opening of the room as well as the simple act of opening one’s eyes puts an end to and, in a way, exhausts the story while gathering around itself.

Moreover: the interior of the room is especially important as it is presented as a [fairytale] space of horrible betrayal. Perrault, Charles, Contes. http://gallica.bnf. fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k101479h, 27.07.2007. Perrault’s

Fairy Tales. George Steiner uses the Bluebeard mythology in a different way. See In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, 1971 4. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, Greek edition, p. 16 5. Ibid., p. 12 6. The emphasis is Derrida’s, Archive Fever, p. 28, Greek edition 7. Thoughts on residing in the archive as a continuation of Vilém Flusser’s early and prophetic thoughts in his book on writing and the transition to the digital age, Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft?, Göttingen, 1987.

8. The unfolding of scientific curiosity, which, for Freud, stems from the curiosity about one’s genitals. See Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory from his Childhood, New York, 1964, (1910) 9. See also Jacques Lacan’s thoughts on Edgar Alan Poe’s short story, The Purloined Letter: a lecture on the topic was given on April 26, 1955 during the seminar Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, first published in 1956, La psychanalyse, n° 2, 1957, pp. 15-44, with an “Introduction”, pp. 1-14 ˇizˇek, we often come across 10. In the writings of Slavoj Z the concept of complication which is exhibited by the authority that accepts any opposition remaining intact in the face of any opposition. The description could be interpreted by the syndrome of the archive that we ˇizˇek gives a Lacanian version are describing here. Z regarding the origin of this condition, e.g. Interrogating the Real, Continuum, 2006. The issue of the invisible action and the absence of concreteness constitute the perspective I am organizing here, the very condition of life in the archive.

11. The nullification I am referring to may be linked to the understanding of equality, which Jacques Rancière connects to writing: “the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is the indifference after all if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available as it is to everyone’s eyes?”, The Politics of Aesthetics, New York, 2004, (Paris, 2000) 12. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, Translated by Oliver Feltham, Continuum, 2007, New York and London, (L’être et l’ événement, Paris, Seuil, 1988)

Revised version of: Aristide Antonas, Residing in ­Archives, first published relating to Monument to Transformation, a project by Zbyne ˇk Baladrán and Vít Havránek, on occasion of the opening of the new tranzitdisplay in Prague, ­November, 2007

89

entry on the Internet is organized as a series of diverse data entered, this does not simply draw attention to a structure that responds to search engines the expansion of the function of the entry has already formed a way of perceiving things.

The object is identified by a series of versions of itself, the personal space by a collection of data.

Within this democratic conception of the object and of the self, concreteness will be redefined while the idea of anxiety concerning depth, which explains the state of things at any given time, is already being mourned.

Residing in the archive today nullifies, in this perspective, the anxiety about origin which constituted the description of the archive according to Derrida. The data entry depends on an entry, not on some elusive, vague origin it may have. Every entry of data functions on a multi-entry level, it arrives at the archive formed as a total of entries, and it can change, and a new one can be added to the same entry.

I described a wounding caused by the opening of the secret archives, the treacherous dynamics of residing in the particular archives and the conditions of social supervision carried out by intelligence services. Next to this residence I construct the schema of a different residence, in a different archive.

On the Internet, a momentum is displayed in terms of the archive: let us describe it through the same wiki logic, but also through the pointing out of so many data repositories, which, through a certain mental geotagging, chart the map of the world as a grouping of its different versions.

Here, in a juxtaposition structure where no opposition, no conflict seems structurally possible, nothing appears dramatic.

The space of the archive of the secret services, seen through a modern-day perspective, appears extremely old and obsolete. But is it? It doesn’t really matter. Perhaps that which could take on political value is precisely this imaginary transformation of the rationale of the archive within the new syndrome of archival confinement that I am trying to describe. This confinement, is, moreover, presented at the outset as a realistic possibility for the removal of any confinement. In its interior there are no dramatic tensions. Its narratives are flaccid. The terrible disasters that open up rooms of betrayal and forgiveness, the concepts of the secret, appear in its interior either as laughable or as old and nullified. The 88

revelations in the condition of the contemporary residence in the archive are carried out in obviousness. The secret itself is submerged in obviousness and the syndrome of confinement introduces us to a certain populization of the secrets of Lacan’s purloined letter9. The secret services are working for authority, authority is granted religious sanctity. But how can one stand before authorities that are enforced through the use of the syndrome of confinement in the archive,10 i.e. through the use of the invisible presence that allows this syndrome, or through intrusion in what was, until today, considered a domestic space?

Isn’t the undisturbed juxtaposition of any one of their active structures lost alongside inert structures while questioning it? The plethora nullifies the difference and the hierarchy between entries.

Any alternative proposal marks just another proposition.11 Thus, the significance of opposition, dispute and conflict is lost in the interior of the archive. Opposition contained within the archive is not, structurally speaking, opposition any more.

The panoptical world of versions constructed during the development of the archive’s confinement syndrome dedramatizes reality. Narrative dynamics are burned within the exposition of different versions: the short narrative reigns and thus there is no betrayal that cannot be recovered from. An archive of betrayal deserves condemnation, war against a certain obviousness of evil. The question concerning the continuation of political vigilance is that it can function within the conditions of this blinding from the viewing brought on by the particular condition of residing in the archive. Within the archive, political weighing cannot circumvent the fact that—in terms of structure, for the forming of today’s world— nothing is left that deserves utter faith: the risk is for one to imagine ways towards a subversive political stance in the interior of the condition of residing in the archive.

The contemporary person remains constantly busy, concentrating keenly on distinctive mnemonic pockets to which he surrender without faith. Outside of these, all that exist are other similar ones. We will remain for quite some time in the condition of the archive syndrome I am describing. A kind of post-event, organized in a different way than Badiou12 imagined, is under formation. The internal denerving of the event using the rationale of the version suspends the meaning and intensity of any action. The event

is always rendered not specific enough. In an analogous sense the house and the private space seek new meanings. And what remains excluded from any possibility of entering an archive shows a possible research area. The future of politics could be a way to penetrate and inhabit the archive.

The shift from a limited personal space to an unconstrained one carries the weight of this extreme transformation of the secret imaginary as encountered here. We describe a change in a function of the archive, namely the person. Even if some have not experienced the terror of residing inside a military or a police secret archive, even if life within the Internet condition continues to remain an unrealized condition, we can understand what different strategies towards public space tend to be present in societies of involuntary or voluntary submission of the self to an archive, and which combined conditions may be created in the intervening space. In this transformation the person is different while he now confronts open space in a different way and is expected to act in it differently. The person also becomes different as he devises other types of stratagems in order to invent enclosed, protected areas in this condition.

1. Two parallel readings are proposed here: Georg ­Simmel’s text on the secret where Simmel writes about the formation of sociability from a secret in Secret et Sociétés secrètes, (French Translation, Circé, Paris, 1996), and the last period of Jacques Derrida’s work on secret. Cf. e.g. his text The Gift of Death or his series of dialogues with Maurizio Ferraris A Taste for the Secret. Derrida gave the title “the secret” to many of his last seminars; he sometimes mentioned he had decided to keep “the secret” as a permanent seminar title.

2. Some of the ideas presented here are proposed in Residing in Archives, a text written as part of the project Monument to Transformation.

3. I refer here to archived corpses, thinking of a typical betrayal space such as Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard: the opening of the secret room in this text is described as a passage from darkness to light: “At first she saw nothing, because the windows were closed ; after a few moments she began to see that the floor was all covered in curdled blood and that in the blood were reflected the bodies of several dead women hanging along the walls”. In only a few words, the narrative energy of the story is vented. But we can nevertheless claim that the story was organized in the anticipation of and the mourning for this phrase. The phrase which describes the opening of the room as well as the simple act of opening one’s eyes puts an end to and, in a way, exhausts the story while gathering around itself.

Moreover: the interior of the room is especially important as it is presented as a [fairytale] space of horrible betrayal. Perrault, Charles, Contes. http://gallica.bnf. fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k101479h, 27.07.2007. Perrault’s

Fairy Tales. George Steiner uses the Bluebeard mythology in a different way. See In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, 1971 4. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, Greek edition, p. 16 5. Ibid., p. 12 6. The emphasis is Derrida’s, Archive Fever, p. 28, Greek edition 7. Thoughts on residing in the archive as a continuation of Vilém Flusser’s early and prophetic thoughts in his book on writing and the transition to the digital age, Die Schrift. Hat Schreiben Zukunft?, Göttingen, 1987.

8. The unfolding of scientific curiosity, which, for Freud, stems from the curiosity about one’s genitals. See Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory from his Childhood, New York, 1964, (1910) 9. See also Jacques Lacan’s thoughts on Edgar Alan Poe’s short story, The Purloined Letter: a lecture on the topic was given on April 26, 1955 during the seminar Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, first published in 1956, La psychanalyse, n° 2, 1957, pp. 15-44, with an “Introduction”, pp. 1-14 ˇizˇek, we often come across 10. In the writings of Slavoj Z the concept of complication which is exhibited by the authority that accepts any opposition remaining intact in the face of any opposition. The description could be interpreted by the syndrome of the archive that we ˇizˇek gives a Lacanian version are describing here. Z regarding the origin of this condition, e.g. Interrogating the Real, Continuum, 2006. The issue of the invisible action and the absence of concreteness constitute the perspective I am organizing here, the very condition of life in the archive.

11. The nullification I am referring to may be linked to the understanding of equality, which Jacques Rancière connects to writing: “the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is the indifference after all if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available as it is to everyone’s eyes?”, The Politics of Aesthetics, New York, 2004, (Paris, 2000) 12. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, Translated by Oliver Feltham, Continuum, 2007, New York and London, (L’être et l’ événement, Paris, Seuil, 1988)

Revised version of: Aristide Antonas, Residing in ­Archives, first published relating to Monument to Transformation, a project by Zbyne ˇk Baladrán and Vít Havránek, on occasion of the opening of the new tranzitdisplay in Prague, ­November, 2007

89

*1969 in San Sebastiรกn, Spain Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, 1998 Single-channel video projection 17 min 30 sec, color, sound Edition 8/10 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

*1969 in San Sebastiรกn, Spain Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, 1998 Single-channel video projection 17 min 30 sec, color, sound Edition 8/10 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Time, Space, Material and Energy in Movement: the Labor of Sergio Prego Peio Aguirre

Post-industrial landscapes incite fantasies in the minds of tomorrow’s dreamers. A blackish stain of soot lying on the concrete can be read as a map. To dissect its surroundings is to discover the watermark from some previous presence. The passing of a nocturnal figure through an abandoned and smoky place, the wet ground and a row of neon lights captivates us with its narrative potential of fantasy. Sweaty brows, workers’ boiler suits; a frozen heart, an empty space. Numerical systems and consumed energy. Any dwelling is good for cyber-spatial mental driving.

The origin and reason of fables not yet ­created can be found in the progressive ­degradation of our natural environment, the alienated experi­ence of urban life, the dehumanisation of physical labour or the isolation derived from working online. Moreover post-industrial environments generate anxiety due to the nature of the place: a manipulated past, a residual future.

In the past, art forms like Minimalism and Land Art ex­plored the possibilities of the aesthetics of entropy. They introduced new materials and ­experienced the sensorial super-excitement as an outcome of three dimensional conquests.

It was at that time, in the midst of industrial standstill, a generational struggle and a feeling of shared disillusionment towards a very post-war capitalist commodity, that the revival of Utopia as a literary genre allied itself with subgenres derived from Science Fiction and other forms of popular culture. In the field of art, hard aesthetics were imposed. Minimalism was like an antidote to emotions, expressiveness and melancholy; a melancholy which included that of postindustrial ruins.

This amalgam of aesthetical drives has currently been brought together by the artist Sergio Prego,

whose work has brought up to date old preoccupations in the shape of new forms following the trend of a post-modern evolution of corporeal iron and steel industry works manufactured biotechnologically.

Tetsuo: the Iron Man (1989) by Shinya Tsukamoto, is one of those films with a visionary fantasy that mixes different narrative genres, placing a fetishist of metal mutating into flesh and iron into a nightmare of apocalyptic flash backs of neo-Tokyo. A strange and devastating horror film that recalls Sergei Eisenstein’s cinema in an hallucinating Manga trip through the most depressive post-industrial Japanese landscape. A Western that possesses an expressiveness that recalls avant-garde cinema. Whatever the time in which it is set, it always appears as a vision of the day after tomorrow. The mutation of a human into a metallic monster, a living jumble of irons, tubes and cables amongst factories and machines for treating heavy metals, boiler-making shops and suburban neighbourhoods. A sub-real fusion of sexual symbolism and a hypnotic industrial techno soundtrack.

From the fusion of both imaginaries of metal -the first aggressive, heroic, and fundamentalist, but still high-art in the end, that is Richard Serra for instance, and the other a product of subcultural enchainment, already converted into an object of cult—emerges a third image, a breach in which Prego operates, suffering well. The cabled scatology, the rusty metal, the buccal orifice and the tubular sodomy of Tetsuo warns us of the corporal transformations of a promised biological emancipation. To be human inside an inhumane world is not the same as reinventing new forms of humanity.

93

Time, Space, Material and Energy in Movement: the Labor of Sergio Prego Peio Aguirre

Post-industrial landscapes incite fantasies in the minds of tomorrow’s dreamers. A blackish stain of soot lying on the concrete can be read as a map. To dissect its surroundings is to discover the watermark from some previous presence. The passing of a nocturnal figure through an abandoned and smoky place, the wet ground and a row of neon lights captivates us with its narrative potential of fantasy. Sweaty brows, workers’ boiler suits; a frozen heart, an empty space. Numerical systems and consumed energy. Any dwelling is good for cyber-spatial mental driving.

The origin and reason of fables not yet ­created can be found in the progressive ­degradation of our natural environment, the alienated experi­ence of urban life, the dehumanisation of physical labour or the isolation derived from working online. Moreover post-industrial environments generate anxiety due to the nature of the place: a manipulated past, a residual future.

In the past, art forms like Minimalism and Land Art ex­plored the possibilities of the aesthetics of entropy. They introduced new materials and ­experienced the sensorial super-excitement as an outcome of three dimensional conquests.

It was at that time, in the midst of industrial standstill, a generational struggle and a feeling of shared disillusionment towards a very post-war capitalist commodity, that the revival of Utopia as a literary genre allied itself with subgenres derived from Science Fiction and other forms of popular culture. In the field of art, hard aesthetics were imposed. Minimalism was like an antidote to emotions, expressiveness and melancholy; a melancholy which included that of postindustrial ruins.

This amalgam of aesthetical drives has currently been brought together by the artist Sergio Prego,

whose work has brought up to date old preoccupations in the shape of new forms following the trend of a post-modern evolution of corporeal iron and steel industry works manufactured biotechnologically.

Tetsuo: the Iron Man (1989) by Shinya Tsukamoto, is one of those films with a visionary fantasy that mixes different narrative genres, placing a fetishist of metal mutating into flesh and iron into a nightmare of apocalyptic flash backs of neo-Tokyo. A strange and devastating horror film that recalls Sergei Eisenstein’s cinema in an hallucinating Manga trip through the most depressive post-industrial Japanese landscape. A Western that possesses an expressiveness that recalls avant-garde cinema. Whatever the time in which it is set, it always appears as a vision of the day after tomorrow. The mutation of a human into a metallic monster, a living jumble of irons, tubes and cables amongst factories and machines for treating heavy metals, boiler-making shops and suburban neighbourhoods. A sub-real fusion of sexual symbolism and a hypnotic industrial techno soundtrack.

From the fusion of both imaginaries of metal -the first aggressive, heroic, and fundamentalist, but still high-art in the end, that is Richard Serra for instance, and the other a product of subcultural enchainment, already converted into an object of cult—emerges a third image, a breach in which Prego operates, suffering well. The cabled scatology, the rusty metal, the buccal orifice and the tubular sodomy of Tetsuo warns us of the corporal transformations of a promised biological emancipation. To be human inside an inhumane world is not the same as reinventing new forms of humanity.

93

Fredric Jameson informs us in his book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005) about medicine as a utopian figure, like an unconscious symbolic transformation of what is human. He writes that “utopian corporeality is however also a haunting, which invests even the most subordinate and shamefaced products of everyday life, such as aspirins, laxatives and deodorants, organ transplants and plastic surgery, all harbouring muted promises of a transfigured body”. Corporal significance equally finds rich possibilities inside the spatial field, from the streets of everyday life to the rooms and nests of the work place itself. New York or Tokyo are the scene where the volatizing experience of the soul takes place, the urban Utopia of the great metropolis, overpopulation, neon rain and ghosts of modernization.

In the anthropomorphic dimension of Minimal art, in the aspect of the body or in its paradoxical presential absence, there is always a constant feature: the anxiety to sublimate the limits. A summary of anchorages, drive belts, harnesses, extensors and fixing points used by the artist, like objects taken from a Sci-Fi novel whose quality and function is described in an exact way. This mutation is also that of the modern man, just like it has been described in J. G. Ballard’s novels Crash or Concrete Island, to take a case in point.

The body and the blood going beyond their own limits, reaching an unreachable surge of power, merging the wound with machinery or with communication vessels. For this is the modern notion of nature.

Sergio Prego’s series of videos Tetsuo, Bound to Fail (1998) conform the decalogue of what is supposed to be the set up and running of what I have called dispositive. The challenge is similar to the technical ambition. The method however, has to be invented. The old function of cinematographic montage is retrieved and put to use as a paradoxal continuity inside the discontinuity. This technique is similar to that used by the Constructivists, although it differs slightly in its results, since in the case of the Russian formalists the superposition and union of two isolated fragments created a new third image and meaning (according to the Kuleshov effect). In Prego’s case the fragment is used as an unchaining element, creating the fiction of movement. However, this illusion can be found in the mind of the spectator. In fact,

his method consists in a paradoxal dismantling by means of connections, making visible the cuts between fragments that in commercial cinema have been accelerated in order to appear real.

However, unlike the images in movement, that only need the illusion of motion, electronic images from television and video create both, that is to say, illusion of motion and image.

There is however also the illusion of depth or of three-dimensionality. Both celluloid as well as electronic images are by definition two dimensional; in the sense that they are projected and observed on a two dimensional surface. In spite of that, the spectator has the feeling of depth or rather of the fiction of depth. The intensity of this simulation varies depending on the technology and technique applied by the artist. Since the pioneers of motion picture, artists have been conscious of this phenomenon, which they have controlled by means of a variety of techniques.

Prego’s videos work in a similar way, looking for the barest and most austere of resources, using photographs and reanimating them, even though blockbusters have exploited these techniques numerous times, for example in the sequences of spectacular explosions, introducing the spectator into the interior of the scene.

In Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, the speed of the perception of time in the image disrupts the reception of time in the spectator. In this sense, the revolutionary filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, discovered that the human eye was capable of registering a film scene of only two or three stills. This implied the possibility of staging diminutive fragments in apparently illogical cuts that not only completely defied the temporality of one’s natural vision, but also the structures of thought. For Vertov the main thing was to use the camera as a cinematic eye more perfect than the human eye in order to explore the chaos of visual phenomena that fills the universe. Using his laboratory of sound and experimenting with the music of noises and montage of stills, the praxis of the Russian prepared the ground for visual avant-garde. Prego shares a similar spirit in the beginning of the new century, when the virtuality of technical image is already a norm, but at a time when it is still possible to use art as testing ground to reinvent new techniques of vision far away from hegemonic technologies.

For example, the soundtrack of the videos reveals the organic aspect of the structures. The union

of each shot with the next, each photo with the next, merges with the rhythm of electronic music, to be exact with the rhythmic sequence that combines each beat with the next, creating spatiality in a repetitive sequence. The musical structure of avant-garde inspiration (already fused with electronic and experimental music) offers rhythms, arrhythmia in the bass, dehierarchical compositions and evocative abstraction for post-contemporary narration. The artist’s soundtrack revolves around the eternal disjunctive of whether or not this sound is abstract or concrete. Although the repeated serialization of his work combines minimalist structures, these include serial musical compositions and noises from L.F.O to Pan sonic including ­Autechre. As the artist himself has stated, “I tried to demonstrate the fact that music is figurative in opposition to the generalised belief that it is abstract. Electronic music represents a way of understanding the body inside space, the beats divide time into proportional parts: time that is used in carrying out repeated physical exercise using constant energy. The perception of time is determined by our physical ability of movement inside space.”

Electronic music also carries with it a description of spaces where it can be broadcast: large industrial stores, peripheral spaces in the nocturnal dynamics of the city. These are the only spaces of freedom which are left, redoubts of a postmodern narrative inaugurated with the depressive deafening of the background noise in David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977). It is often said that necessity intensifies ingenuity, and in Sergio Prego’s case this is a prerequisite, for the greater the technical deprivation, the greater the display of imagination seems to be. The difference of art based on low technology with that based on high technology should not be overlooked here.

Revised version of: Peio Aguirre, Time, Space, Material and Energy in Movement: the Labour of Sergio Prego, first published in: Sergio Prego, exhibition catalog, Galería Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, January-February 2006, translated from the Spanish by Lorraine Kerslake

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Fredric Jameson informs us in his book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005) about medicine as a utopian figure, like an unconscious symbolic transformation of what is human. He writes that “utopian corporeality is however also a haunting, which invests even the most subordinate and shamefaced products of everyday life, such as aspirins, laxatives and deodorants, organ transplants and plastic surgery, all harbouring muted promises of a transfigured body”. Corporal significance equally finds rich possibilities inside the spatial field, from the streets of everyday life to the rooms and nests of the work place itself. New York or Tokyo are the scene where the volatizing experience of the soul takes place, the urban Utopia of the great metropolis, overpopulation, neon rain and ghosts of modernization.

In the anthropomorphic dimension of Minimal art, in the aspect of the body or in its paradoxical presential absence, there is always a constant feature: the anxiety to sublimate the limits. A summary of anchorages, drive belts, harnesses, extensors and fixing points used by the artist, like objects taken from a Sci-Fi novel whose quality and function is described in an exact way. This mutation is also that of the modern man, just like it has been described in J. G. Ballard’s novels Crash or Concrete Island, to take a case in point.

The body and the blood going beyond their own limits, reaching an unreachable surge of power, merging the wound with machinery or with communication vessels. For this is the modern notion of nature.

Sergio Prego’s series of videos Tetsuo, Bound to Fail (1998) conform the decalogue of what is supposed to be the set up and running of what I have called dispositive. The challenge is similar to the technical ambition. The method however, has to be invented. The old function of cinematographic montage is retrieved and put to use as a paradoxal continuity inside the discontinuity. This technique is similar to that used by the Constructivists, although it differs slightly in its results, since in the case of the Russian formalists the superposition and union of two isolated fragments created a new third image and meaning (according to the Kuleshov effect). In Prego’s case the fragment is used as an unchaining element, creating the fiction of movement. However, this illusion can be found in the mind of the spectator. In fact,

his method consists in a paradoxal dismantling by means of connections, making visible the cuts between fragments that in commercial cinema have been accelerated in order to appear real.

However, unlike the images in movement, that only need the illusion of motion, electronic images from television and video create both, that is to say, illusion of motion and image.

There is however also the illusion of depth or of three-dimensionality. Both celluloid as well as electronic images are by definition two dimensional; in the sense that they are projected and observed on a two dimensional surface. In spite of that, the spectator has the feeling of depth or rather of the fiction of depth. The intensity of this simulation varies depending on the technology and technique applied by the artist. Since the pioneers of motion picture, artists have been conscious of this phenomenon, which they have controlled by means of a variety of techniques.

Prego’s videos work in a similar way, looking for the barest and most austere of resources, using photographs and reanimating them, even though blockbusters have exploited these techniques numerous times, for example in the sequences of spectacular explosions, introducing the spectator into the interior of the scene.

In Tetsuo, Bound to Fail, the speed of the perception of time in the image disrupts the reception of time in the spectator. In this sense, the revolutionary filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, discovered that the human eye was capable of registering a film scene of only two or three stills. This implied the possibility of staging diminutive fragments in apparently illogical cuts that not only completely defied the temporality of one’s natural vision, but also the structures of thought. For Vertov the main thing was to use the camera as a cinematic eye more perfect than the human eye in order to explore the chaos of visual phenomena that fills the universe. Using his laboratory of sound and experimenting with the music of noises and montage of stills, the praxis of the Russian prepared the ground for visual avant-garde. Prego shares a similar spirit in the beginning of the new century, when the virtuality of technical image is already a norm, but at a time when it is still possible to use art as testing ground to reinvent new techniques of vision far away from hegemonic technologies.

For example, the soundtrack of the videos reveals the organic aspect of the structures. The union

of each shot with the next, each photo with the next, merges with the rhythm of electronic music, to be exact with the rhythmic sequence that combines each beat with the next, creating spatiality in a repetitive sequence. The musical structure of avant-garde inspiration (already fused with electronic and experimental music) offers rhythms, arrhythmia in the bass, dehierarchical compositions and evocative abstraction for post-contemporary narration. The artist’s soundtrack revolves around the eternal disjunctive of whether or not this sound is abstract or concrete. Although the repeated serialization of his work combines minimalist structures, these include serial musical compositions and noises from L.F.O to Pan sonic including ­Autechre. As the artist himself has stated, “I tried to demonstrate the fact that music is figurative in opposition to the generalised belief that it is abstract. Electronic music represents a way of understanding the body inside space, the beats divide time into proportional parts: time that is used in carrying out repeated physical exercise using constant energy. The perception of time is determined by our physical ability of movement inside space.”

Electronic music also carries with it a description of spaces where it can be broadcast: large industrial stores, peripheral spaces in the nocturnal dynamics of the city. These are the only spaces of freedom which are left, redoubts of a postmodern narrative inaugurated with the depressive deafening of the background noise in David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977). It is often said that necessity intensifies ingenuity, and in Sergio Prego’s case this is a prerequisite, for the greater the technical deprivation, the greater the display of imagination seems to be. The difference of art based on low technology with that based on high technology should not be overlooked here.

Revised version of: Peio Aguirre, Time, Space, Material and Energy in Movement: the Labour of Sergio Prego, first published in: Sergio Prego, exhibition catalog, Galería Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, January-February 2006, translated from the Spanish by Lorraine Kerslake

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*1938 in Appenzell, Switzerland Bett (Bed), 1996 Single-channel video projection 4 min 10 sec, color, sound Edition 7/10 Heufieber (Hay Fever), 2006 Single-channel video projection 2 min 30 sec, color, sound Edition 1/10 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

*1938 in Appenzell, Switzerland Bett (Bed), 1996 Single-channel video projection 4 min 10 sec, color, sound Edition 7/10 Heufieber (Hay Fever), 2006 Single-channel video projection 2 min 30 sec, color, sound Edition 1/10 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Roman Signer’s Acts of Wonder Gregory Volk

Since the early 1970s, Swiss artist Roman ­“Signer has been developing an extraordinary body of work, consisting of brief, transitory pieces and durable sculptures that are evidence of a process as well as an event, along with drawings and endless documentation. Many of his projects mix an air of quasi-scientific research (although of a decidedly homemade variety) with an impish, pranksterish humor. Sometimes this research, this desire to see what happens if a brief chain of events is set into motion, can be wildly funny, with slapstick mishaps, moments when things break down or veer off unexpectedly into mini-disasters.

A number of historical sources feed Signer’s unorthodox art, including post-Minimalist austerity, Fluxus high jinks, various kinds of process or performance art and elements of land art. Signer first made his mark in the early to mid-1970s with outdoor sculptures such as spare geometric forms blasted into snow fields via explosives; a gridlike structure of vessels that collected, and then spilled over with, rainwater; or an explosion in a metal box in a forest sending smoke out of four openings to make a cross shape. Works such as these suggest that Signer is very much an heir to land artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria and the early Dennis Oppenheim. However, Signer rarely alters the landscape in any lasting sense and typically eschews anything monumental in favor of brief actions or events in dialogue with their surroundings, finally to disperse into the environment altogether, leaving only the scantiest of traces, or none at all.

No trace, that is, except for documentation in photographs, videos and films. Right from the beginning of his career, Signer has assiduously documented just about all of his actions in a 98

before-during-and-after manner reminiscent of the laboratory. Photographic documentation, of course, was also important for the first generation of land artists, and was in fact the primary way that most viewers encountered their works.

With Signer, however, documentation is central to his oeuvre. It reveals his process—little cause-and-effect vignettes—and it also captures and preserves the startling beauty of his actions.

While Signer has had many collaborators through the years, since 1994 his chief documenter, in videos, has been his Polish wife, Aleksandra Signer, herself a compelling artist whose medium is video. For all his eccentricities, Signer remains an image-maker par excellence, which his trove of documentation clearly reveals.

Occasionally during the 1970s, but increasingly during the 1980s and continuing to this day, Signer has appeared in his work, and when he does it’s as both instigator and subject. He’s like an inscrutable Everyman going about his odd business in lonely places, his slightly rumpled appearance, deadpan expression and deliberate motions all a signature part of his esthetic. In other respects, he is famously reticent, adverse to showmanship and actually something of a camera-shy recluse.

In many instances Signer’s experiments obliquely suggest enigmatic myths or ambiguous rituals—some spiritual birth or rebirth, perhaps a reference to folklore or a fairy tale, maybe a scrap of magic from pre-Christian rites which have long since vanished from memory. It’s also one of many instances, like Signer’s kayak trip on the road, when he put himself in what could have been a very dangerous situation. The possibility of bodily harm, however, is not something Signer seeks out, and his works have nothing to do with physical punishment or endurance. On the

Heufieber (Hay Fever), 2006

contrary, he does everything possible to shield himself from danger, and his work is devoid of bravado altogether. In fact, if it is possible to make discreet explosions, or cause humble moments of destruction, that’s precisely what Signer does. Still, danger is often a factor, and it’s an integral part of the whole way he conceives sculptures: not as things laboriously made in the studio but as in-process constellations of forces which contain his signature flash points of crisis, catharsis or both.

Signer’s inventiveness seems inexhaustible.

Consider another action with a toy helicopter, for which Signer went to sleep in a bed (Bed, 1996).

In the video you see him motionless, peaceful, a picture of perfect relaxation, but then suddenly

a helicopter flies into the room. It comes nearer, then darts away. It moves up, descends and then inquisitively comes within inches of Signer’s head, as if it were some wary wild creature overcome by curiosity. Signer never twitches, shifts position or lifts his head—fortunately, because one false move here could have left him seriously injured or dead, as this was a powerful device. (When questioned about the danger, Signer merely says that the person operating the helicopter via remote control was the best pilot in Switzerland.) A certain tension is apparent in the video, but then so, too, is tenderness, vulnerability, joy, stupidity and acceptance.

Revised version of: Gregory Volk, Roman Signer’s Acts of Wonder, first published in: Art in America, June, 2001

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Roman Signer’s Acts of Wonder Gregory Volk

Since the early 1970s, Swiss artist Roman ­“Signer has been developing an extraordinary body of work, consisting of brief, transitory pieces and durable sculptures that are evidence of a process as well as an event, along with drawings and endless documentation. Many of his projects mix an air of quasi-scientific research (although of a decidedly homemade variety) with an impish, pranksterish humor. Sometimes this research, this desire to see what happens if a brief chain of events is set into motion, can be wildly funny, with slapstick mishaps, moments when things break down or veer off unexpectedly into mini-disasters.

A number of historical sources feed Signer’s unorthodox art, including post-Minimalist austerity, Fluxus high jinks, various kinds of process or performance art and elements of land art. Signer first made his mark in the early to mid-1970s with outdoor sculptures such as spare geometric forms blasted into snow fields via explosives; a gridlike structure of vessels that collected, and then spilled over with, rainwater; or an explosion in a metal box in a forest sending smoke out of four openings to make a cross shape. Works such as these suggest that Signer is very much an heir to land artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria and the early Dennis Oppenheim. However, Signer rarely alters the landscape in any lasting sense and typically eschews anything monumental in favor of brief actions or events in dialogue with their surroundings, finally to disperse into the environment altogether, leaving only the scantiest of traces, or none at all.

No trace, that is, except for documentation in photographs, videos and films. Right from the beginning of his career, Signer has assiduously documented just about all of his actions in a 98

before-during-and-after manner reminiscent of the laboratory. Photographic documentation, of course, was also important for the first generation of land artists, and was in fact the primary way that most viewers encountered their works.

With Signer, however, documentation is central to his oeuvre. It reveals his process—little cause-and-effect vignettes—and it also captures and preserves the startling beauty of his actions.

While Signer has had many collaborators through the years, since 1994 his chief documenter, in videos, has been his Polish wife, Aleksandra Signer, herself a compelling artist whose medium is video. For all his eccentricities, Signer remains an image-maker par excellence, which his trove of documentation clearly reveals.

Occasionally during the 1970s, but increasingly during the 1980s and continuing to this day, Signer has appeared in his work, and when he does it’s as both instigator and subject. He’s like an inscrutable Everyman going about his odd business in lonely places, his slightly rumpled appearance, deadpan expression and deliberate motions all a signature part of his esthetic. In other respects, he is famously reticent, adverse to showmanship and actually something of a camera-shy recluse.

In many instances Signer’s experiments obliquely suggest enigmatic myths or ambiguous rituals—some spiritual birth or rebirth, perhaps a reference to folklore or a fairy tale, maybe a scrap of magic from pre-Christian rites which have long since vanished from memory. It’s also one of many instances, like Signer’s kayak trip on the road, when he put himself in what could have been a very dangerous situation. The possibility of bodily harm, however, is not something Signer seeks out, and his works have nothing to do with physical punishment or endurance. On the

Heufieber (Hay Fever), 2006

contrary, he does everything possible to shield himself from danger, and his work is devoid of bravado altogether. In fact, if it is possible to make discreet explosions, or cause humble moments of destruction, that’s precisely what Signer does. Still, danger is often a factor, and it’s an integral part of the whole way he conceives sculptures: not as things laboriously made in the studio but as in-process constellations of forces which contain his signature flash points of crisis, catharsis or both.

Signer’s inventiveness seems inexhaustible.

Consider another action with a toy helicopter, for which Signer went to sleep in a bed (Bed, 1996).

In the video you see him motionless, peaceful, a picture of perfect relaxation, but then suddenly

a helicopter flies into the room. It comes nearer, then darts away. It moves up, descends and then inquisitively comes within inches of Signer’s head, as if it were some wary wild creature overcome by curiosity. Signer never twitches, shifts position or lifts his head—fortunately, because one false move here could have left him seriously injured or dead, as this was a powerful device. (When questioned about the danger, Signer merely says that the person operating the helicopter via remote control was the best pilot in Switzerland.) A certain tension is apparent in the video, but then so, too, is tenderness, vulnerability, joy, stupidity and acceptance.

Revised version of: Gregory Volk, Roman Signer’s Acts of Wonder, first published in: Art in America, June, 2001

99

*1936 in Dodge City, KS, USA Life After on Canvas, 1983–1997 Triptych of digitized ink prints on canvas with 16mm film projection 1 min 13 sec, color, sound Edition 1/3 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Dennis Hopper, best known as Hollywood’s bad boy actor and director, has been a member of the Los Angeles avant-garde since the 1950s. His black and white photographic chronicles of the American art world from 1961–67 have been widely presented; but lesser so his later work in painting, assemblage and installation. Life After on Canvas is the documentation of a cataclysmic self-explosion with a Russian Death-Chair, a performance with a cathartic effect that would symbolize the end of an era of self-destructive drug-intake as well as the experimental psychedelic expression in Hopper’s life: “I just go crazy for a couple of weeks using a lot of cocaine, and I do all these paintings, and I go down to Houston. Walter (Hopps, director of the Rice Media Center in Houston, TX) gets me a gallery to show ‘em in, at the same time I’m showing my photographs at Rice University, the de Menils have a place there. And then I blow myself up at the Big H Speedway: I put twenty sticks of dynamite around myself in this race car arena, and I blow myself up, and the dynamite won’t blow in on itself, and I do this performance, and then I announce that I have now started painting again. So the last work I do is Bomb Drop in 1968 and then 15 years later I blow myself up to announce my return to the artworld and start painting again… Okay, and then from there I’m locked up, I’m incarcerated and I go through a bunch of shit and crap and so, and finally I get sober and I go through a year or so, whatever.”

(Dennis Hopper)*

* Dennis Hopper. A System of Moments, Ed. Peter Noever, MAK, Vienna, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2001, pp. 286-287

*1936 in Dodge City, KS, USA Life After on Canvas, 1983–1997 Triptych of digitized ink prints on canvas with 16mm film projection 1 min 13 sec, color, sound Edition 1/3 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Dennis Hopper, best known as Hollywood’s bad boy actor and director, has been a member of the Los Angeles avant-garde since the 1950s. His black and white photographic chronicles of the American art world from 1961–67 have been widely presented; but lesser so his later work in painting, assemblage and installation. Life After on Canvas is the documentation of a cataclysmic self-explosion with a Russian Death-Chair, a performance with a cathartic effect that would symbolize the end of an era of self-destructive drug-intake as well as the experimental psychedelic expression in Hopper’s life: “I just go crazy for a couple of weeks using a lot of cocaine, and I do all these paintings, and I go down to Houston. Walter (Hopps, director of the Rice Media Center in Houston, TX) gets me a gallery to show ‘em in, at the same time I’m showing my photographs at Rice University, the de Menils have a place there. And then I blow myself up at the Big H Speedway: I put twenty sticks of dynamite around myself in this race car arena, and I blow myself up, and the dynamite won’t blow in on itself, and I do this performance, and then I announce that I have now started painting again. So the last work I do is Bomb Drop in 1968 and then 15 years later I blow myself up to announce my return to the artworld and start painting again… Okay, and then from there I’m locked up, I’m incarcerated and I go through a bunch of shit and crap and so, and finally I get sober and I go through a year or so, whatever.”

(Dennis Hopper)*

* Dennis Hopper. A System of Moments, Ed. Peter Noever, MAK, Vienna, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2001, pp. 286-287

*1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, USA Untitled Film Still, 1979 Gelatin silver print 76 x 102 cm Edition 1/3 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Since 1977 Sherman has combined the roles of director, photographer and actor, to photograph herself in a variety of personas and guises, which explore and expose cultural stereotyping.

Uninterested in self-portraiture, her images ­address issues of gender identity, voyeurism and representational power systems, examining the role of art in perpetuating or commenting on these issues.

Sherman began Untitled Film Stills when she was 23 years old.The first series of 69 black and white photographs take as their subject female characters and scenarios of 1950s and 60s ­Hollywood B-movies. Using make-up, wigs, costumes and props, Sherman impersonates generic types of fictionalised femininity—the blonde bombshell, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex ­kitten, the chic starlet, the working class housewife, the office girl, the Broadway actress. They are instantly recognizable characters, as constructed as the settings they inhabit. Always alone they appear caught in a suspended, often intro­ spective, moment. What they are thinking remains an open field for our speculation. As characters they have no interiority, they are instruments of mass media fiction. Lured into the drama we project onto their surface our own interpretation and narrative. The ambiguity and elusiveness of their meaning is one of the images’ strengths.

They are in many ways about thwarted desire: fragments of an unknown whole, stills without a film. (Soraya Rodríguez)

*1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, USA Untitled Film Still, 1979 Gelatin silver print 76 x 102 cm Edition 1/3 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Since 1977 Sherman has combined the roles of director, photographer and actor, to photograph herself in a variety of personas and guises, which explore and expose cultural stereotyping.

Uninterested in self-portraiture, her images ­address issues of gender identity, voyeurism and representational power systems, examining the role of art in perpetuating or commenting on these issues.

Sherman began Untitled Film Stills when she was 23 years old.The first series of 69 black and white photographs take as their subject female characters and scenarios of 1950s and 60s ­Hollywood B-movies. Using make-up, wigs, costumes and props, Sherman impersonates generic types of fictionalised femininity—the blonde bombshell, the luscious librarian, the domesticated sex ­kitten, the chic starlet, the working class housewife, the office girl, the Broadway actress. They are instantly recognizable characters, as constructed as the settings they inhabit. Always alone they appear caught in a suspended, often intro­ spective, moment. What they are thinking remains an open field for our speculation. As characters they have no interiority, they are instruments of mass media fiction. Lured into the drama we project onto their surface our own interpretation and narrative. The ambiguity and elusiveness of their meaning is one of the images’ strengths.

They are in many ways about thwarted desire: fragments of an unknown whole, stills without a film. (Soraya Rodríguez)

*1960 in Padua, Italy Super-Noi (Torino), 1992 Ink on 50 sheets of acetate Each 29.7 x 21 cm Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

*1960 in Padua, Italy Super-Noi (Torino), 1992 Ink on 50 sheets of acetate Each 29.7 x 21 cm Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Maurizio Cattelan Super-Noi (Torino)

Super-Noi (Torino) / Super-Us (Torino) reflects Cattelan’s interest in how people around us perceive us differently from the way we actually are.

The work’s title references and demystifies one of the key concepts of psychoanalysis: the superego, the part of the subject that internalizes moral rules and social restrictions. Cattelan had his relatives and friends give physical descriptions of him to a forensic sketch artist, who then drew portraits without knowing the actual subject being described. In place of a possible unified self, Cattelan offers a comically schizophrenic exposition of different interpretations of his identity.

Nancy Spector: I see that your life of crime has deep roots. In many of your pieces you seem to glorify the person of the burglar, like the time you exhibited actual safes that had been picked open by thieves (-157,000,000, 1992) or when you asked the police to make composite portraits of yourself from various descriptions given to them by friends and relatives (Super noi / Super Us, 1992).

Maurizio Cattelan: That piece was really about how people around you perceive you in different ways than how you really are. So I was thinking about visualizing the idea of the self. The drawings really looked like me, but at the same time they were like cartoons. They were terrific. I don’t know if it was a fluke. […]

Nancy Spector: Your work exits in the interstices between objects and actions. It enters the art institution only to disrupt it, but that is only when you are not ignoring it entirely, working independently, inventing your own structures. Do you have an antagonistic relationship to the museum or the gallery system, or are you lovingly pointing out their contradictions from within?

Maurizio Cattelan: How can I contest the system if I’m totally inside it? I want benefits from this system. So it’s like spitting in the hand of someone who pays your salary. I’m not trying to be against institutions or museums. Maybe I’m just saying that we are all corrupted in a way; life itself is corrupted, and that’s the way we like it. I’m just trying to get a slice of the pie, like everyone else.*

* Nancy Spector in conversation with Maurizio Cattelan, in: Maurizio Cattelan, Phaidon Press, London/NY, 2000, pp. 32-34

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Maurizio Cattelan Super-Noi (Torino)

Super-Noi (Torino) / Super-Us (Torino) reflects Cattelan’s interest in how people around us perceive us differently from the way we actually are.

The work’s title references and demystifies one of the key concepts of psychoanalysis: the superego, the part of the subject that internalizes moral rules and social restrictions. Cattelan had his relatives and friends give physical descriptions of him to a forensic sketch artist, who then drew portraits without knowing the actual subject being described. In place of a possible unified self, Cattelan offers a comically schizophrenic exposition of different interpretations of his identity.

Nancy Spector: I see that your life of crime has deep roots. In many of your pieces you seem to glorify the person of the burglar, like the time you exhibited actual safes that had been picked open by thieves (-157,000,000, 1992) or when you asked the police to make composite portraits of yourself from various descriptions given to them by friends and relatives (Super noi / Super Us, 1992).

Maurizio Cattelan: That piece was really about how people around you perceive you in different ways than how you really are. So I was thinking about visualizing the idea of the self. The drawings really looked like me, but at the same time they were like cartoons. They were terrific. I don’t know if it was a fluke. […]

Nancy Spector: Your work exits in the interstices between objects and actions. It enters the art institution only to disrupt it, but that is only when you are not ignoring it entirely, working independently, inventing your own structures. Do you have an antagonistic relationship to the museum or the gallery system, or are you lovingly pointing out their contradictions from within?

Maurizio Cattelan: How can I contest the system if I’m totally inside it? I want benefits from this system. So it’s like spitting in the hand of someone who pays your salary. I’m not trying to be against institutions or museums. Maybe I’m just saying that we are all corrupted in a way; life itself is corrupted, and that’s the way we like it. I’m just trying to get a slice of the pie, like everyone else.*

* Nancy Spector in conversation with Maurizio Cattelan, in: Maurizio Cattelan, Phaidon Press, London/NY, 2000, pp. 32-34

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Out of Place Revisited Andreas Spiegl

At its core the title of this contribution represents a failure. Out of Place Revisited refers to a return to a place that is nevertheless the wrong place and for this reason is not revisited, but is actually missed. One revisits a place that used to be a different place. In the setting of this conference I take the liberty to identify the place that is being missed here as the body. At stake thus would be a revisiting of the body, which in affect and through affects is sought out again but simultaneously missed because it is a different body. I don’t suppose it is necessary to add that the phrase Out of Place is taken from the title of Edward Said’s memoir. And in referring to Said and his problematizing of orientalism, I would like to at least note that I mean to recognize in this other body addressed in and through affect in some way the other as referred to in colonial discourse: the unknown, the foreign, the exotic, the other of the self, which now, however, has chosen one’s body itself as the colonial object of discovery and conquest—the affective body as unknown territory. The thesis of this outline is thus directed at the concept of a subject that in a certain sense is colonizing itself and, in the process, recognizes the affective body as a foreign body located inside its own corporeality or, to put it differently, experiences through its own body an alien body inside itself.

The affective body is alien to the subject because the affective body is determined by a different set of rules and mechanisms than those in place for the subject under specific cultural, historic, and political conditions. The affective body outlines a concept of the body that wants to (re-)articulate itself exactly beyond these conditions: a body that precedes the subject while at the same time being located beyond the subject—a body that

can’t be but categorically missed or neglected by the subject. Arguments for this affective body implicitly take a stance against the subject and related theories—mainly those that identify in the body primarily a level of representation and consequently tie it to symbolic meaning. Already in the title of her book, Marie-Luise Angerer makes her point explicit: the fact that such arguments for the affective body represent in and of themselves a perspective with a cultural claim.

She is not referring to affect alone, in which she rightfully locates the emergence of a Foucauldian dispositive, but speaks of a “desire for affect”—that is, a claim that is less concerned with affect in its relation to the subject and is directed more—through intention or by tendency—toward the production of affect, which the subject then can look out for.

What is being marshaled against this subject is primarily the body, as it supposedly has been neglected in various theories of the subject, the material body or, more precisely, the flesh: “The flesh, wild and active, makes its own demands” (Donn Welton 1998, 201). Differing from Angerer’s diagnosis of desire, Donn Welton even speaks of a “need for affection” (1998, 193). In order to explain what she means by need, she refers to hunger: “Notice that hunger can exist just as a need, without being hunger for a particular substance or for a type of food. The need for affection, as well, can be sensed without it being structured as affection—for, even less as consciousness—of. … They are proactive and send us looking beyond the body, even if we do not know for what. Needs create demands” (Donn Welton 1998, 193). In the final chapter of her text titled Affectivity, Eros and the Body, Welton outlines the possible perspectives for this notion of affect, which can have equal significance for speech: “language, which at this level communicates much more by tones and feelings than by cognitive content… and even further to the development of collective taste and what Bourdieu describes as habitus” (1998, 201). On this level the affective body becomes the foundation for a subject whose language, habitus, and self-perception are its secondary effects.

But simultaneously the body concept introduced here evades the subject. Removed from an early childhood conception of the body that cannot yet differentiate between inside and outside, between the body of the mother and the body of the child,

the subject faces a boundary. And this boundary is marked by affect, which is located “beyond the body.” From this perspective the affective body is both constitutional and out of reach for the subject. Now the goal here is not to introduce the various psychoanalytic approaches, from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan, that have attempted to relate this realm of the affective to the symbolic level, but only to examine the consequences of this retreat of the subject from the affective body.

In everyday culture there are multiple fringes of the desire for an affective body, and they touch upon issues discussed in the context of biopolitical discourses. There is a wide range here, from Giorgio Agamben’s description of the “bare life” of the homo sacer to the experience society of Gerhard Schulze. This involves the complete disfranchisement of the subject as well as various forms of subject suspension in wellness culture or in the media-based entertainment industries.

Thrown into relief here is an immediate turn to the body, which is separated from the claims of the subject and is being either groomed or challenged in a culture of diversions based on speed of reaction and stimulus. From this perspective, the various spas and wellness centers located around Vienna are nothing but a calmer version of the labor done with a joystick in front of a computer game. What both produce is a temporary suspension of the claims of the subject in order to affectively visit the body—in other words, in order to allow for an escapade of the body to reinstate its unknown aspects. In this sense, total relaxation and total tension would both be affective technologies of subject suspension.

Searching for theoretical figures that would help describe this suspension of the subject in favor of the affective body, it seems productive to look into postcolonial and critical race theory.

In Loving the Alien, a book edited by Diedrich Diederichsen, Renee Green published an essay titled Leidige Liebe: My Alien/My Self—Readings at Work. In a chapter of this text titled Affection Afflictions: My Alien, My Self, she examines the notion of affect in its divergent meanings—ranging from love, sympathy, and affection to disease and infection—inspecting it against the backdrop of the demarcation between the familiar and the foreign. She writes: “What is alien in me? What 109

Out of Place Revisited Andreas Spiegl

At its core the title of this contribution represents a failure. Out of Place Revisited refers to a return to a place that is nevertheless the wrong place and for this reason is not revisited, but is actually missed. One revisits a place that used to be a different place. In the setting of this conference I take the liberty to identify the place that is being missed here as the body. At stake thus would be a revisiting of the body, which in affect and through affects is sought out again but simultaneously missed because it is a different body. I don’t suppose it is necessary to add that the phrase Out of Place is taken from the title of Edward Said’s memoir. And in referring to Said and his problematizing of orientalism, I would like to at least note that I mean to recognize in this other body addressed in and through affect in some way the other as referred to in colonial discourse: the unknown, the foreign, the exotic, the other of the self, which now, however, has chosen one’s body itself as the colonial object of discovery and conquest—the affective body as unknown territory. The thesis of this outline is thus directed at the concept of a subject that in a certain sense is colonizing itself and, in the process, recognizes the affective body as a foreign body located inside its own corporeality or, to put it differently, experiences through its own body an alien body inside itself.

The affective body is alien to the subject because the affective body is determined by a different set of rules and mechanisms than those in place for the subject under specific cultural, historic, and political conditions. The affective body outlines a concept of the body that wants to (re-)articulate itself exactly beyond these conditions: a body that precedes the subject while at the same time being located beyond the subject—a body that

can’t be but categorically missed or neglected by the subject. Arguments for this affective body implicitly take a stance against the subject and related theories—mainly those that identify in the body primarily a level of representation and consequently tie it to symbolic meaning. Already in the title of her book, Marie-Luise Angerer makes her point explicit: the fact that such arguments for the affective body represent in and of themselves a perspective with a cultural claim.

She is not referring to affect alone, in which she rightfully locates the emergence of a Foucauldian dispositive, but speaks of a “desire for affect”—that is, a claim that is less concerned with affect in its relation to the subject and is directed more—through intention or by tendency—toward the production of affect, which the subject then can look out for.

What is being marshaled against this subject is primarily the body, as it supposedly has been neglected in various theories of the subject, the material body or, more precisely, the flesh: “The flesh, wild and active, makes its own demands” (Donn Welton 1998, 201). Differing from Angerer’s diagnosis of desire, Donn Welton even speaks of a “need for affection” (1998, 193). In order to explain what she means by need, she refers to hunger: “Notice that hunger can exist just as a need, without being hunger for a particular substance or for a type of food. The need for affection, as well, can be sensed without it being structured as affection—for, even less as consciousness—of. … They are proactive and send us looking beyond the body, even if we do not know for what. Needs create demands” (Donn Welton 1998, 193). In the final chapter of her text titled Affectivity, Eros and the Body, Welton outlines the possible perspectives for this notion of affect, which can have equal significance for speech: “language, which at this level communicates much more by tones and feelings than by cognitive content… and even further to the development of collective taste and what Bourdieu describes as habitus” (1998, 201). On this level the affective body becomes the foundation for a subject whose language, habitus, and self-perception are its secondary effects.

But simultaneously the body concept introduced here evades the subject. Removed from an early childhood conception of the body that cannot yet differentiate between inside and outside, between the body of the mother and the body of the child,

the subject faces a boundary. And this boundary is marked by affect, which is located “beyond the body.” From this perspective the affective body is both constitutional and out of reach for the subject. Now the goal here is not to introduce the various psychoanalytic approaches, from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan, that have attempted to relate this realm of the affective to the symbolic level, but only to examine the consequences of this retreat of the subject from the affective body.

In everyday culture there are multiple fringes of the desire for an affective body, and they touch upon issues discussed in the context of biopolitical discourses. There is a wide range here, from Giorgio Agamben’s description of the “bare life” of the homo sacer to the experience society of Gerhard Schulze. This involves the complete disfranchisement of the subject as well as various forms of subject suspension in wellness culture or in the media-based entertainment industries.

Thrown into relief here is an immediate turn to the body, which is separated from the claims of the subject and is being either groomed or challenged in a culture of diversions based on speed of reaction and stimulus. From this perspective, the various spas and wellness centers located around Vienna are nothing but a calmer version of the labor done with a joystick in front of a computer game. What both produce is a temporary suspension of the claims of the subject in order to affectively visit the body—in other words, in order to allow for an escapade of the body to reinstate its unknown aspects. In this sense, total relaxation and total tension would both be affective technologies of subject suspension.

Searching for theoretical figures that would help describe this suspension of the subject in favor of the affective body, it seems productive to look into postcolonial and critical race theory.

In Loving the Alien, a book edited by Diedrich Diederichsen, Renee Green published an essay titled Leidige Liebe: My Alien/My Self—Readings at Work. In a chapter of this text titled Affection Afflictions: My Alien, My Self, she examines the notion of affect in its divergent meanings—ranging from love, sympathy, and affection to disease and infection—inspecting it against the backdrop of the demarcation between the familiar and the foreign. She writes: “What is alien in me? What 109

is alien to me? What distinguishes my self from that which it is not and from what lies outside?

Which qualities are alien and in comparison to what?” (Green 1998, 146). What is being addressed here is the entanglement of two seemingly contradictory relationships to the subject in the notion of affect: the affection and love that can afflict the body can at the same time also—in the heat of the moment—infect the body, making it appear affectively diseased or alien. In this sense the (affliction of) affection and the alien are not mutually exclusive, but can even blur into each other. So to affectively experience affection can result in feeling alien to oneself, in feelings of alienation—My Alien, My Self. Myself, an Alien.

The question raised by Green here has also, as early as 1952, been described as a central experience by Frantz Fanon. Even if this story is one of the foundational texts of postcolonial theory and can be considered overly familiar, I’d like to quote it once more, specifically in order to point to the blurry transition between the “affection” for a subject and the “alienation” of the body.

The story tells about a small child who encounters Fanon, turns to the mother, and says: “Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me. [this much about affection] “Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened!

Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible …

My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly, look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, … the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones.

(Fanon, 1995, 323f.) [this much about alienation]

Fanon describes here in detail the transition from affection (an external stimulus that flicked over me) to an affective experience of the body as alien body (My body was given back to me sprawled out … that cold that goes through your bones). A few lines further down he concludes: “I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. … I am fixed. … I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in but a new kind of man, a new genus.” (Fanon, 1995, 325).

110

I think that the effective mechanism of affect cannot be described more adequately than with the words “overdetermined from without. I am laid bare. I feel.” Outside and inside blur, the alien and the familiar correlate at this point.

In order to clarify, I’d like to quote once more Donn Welton’s description of the affective in early childhood narcissism: “It involves a relation to the Other but one in which the Other is so within that he or she cannot be experienced as without.”

And she continues with a quotation from Nancy Chodorov’s book The Reproduction of Mothering that could be a downright commentary on Fanon’s anecdote: “It is ‘an unintended consequence of the infant’s lack of reality sense and perception of its mother as separate’” (Welton 1998, 198). Affect and the perception of another, or of difference, of an Other, seamlessly blur into one another. In the moment of affect, the difference established between the self and the other is simultaneously confirmed and suspended.

In his book The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha refers to the passage from Fanon quoted above. He suggests a reading that establishes a connection of the relation of the difference between self and other and their simultaneous blurring with fetishization. It is characteristic for the fetish to represent both the absent and the present. “Within discourse, the fetish represents the simultaneous play between metaphor as substitution (masking absence and difference) and metonymy (which contiguously registers the perceived lack). The fetish or stereotype gives access to an ‘identity’ which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defense, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in recognition of difference and disavowal of it. This conflict of pleasure / unpleasure, absence / presence, has a fundamental signification for colonial discourse. For the scene of fetishism is also the scene of the reactivation and repetition of primal fantasy—the subject’s desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by its division” (Bhabha, 1994, 74).

The theoretical deduction of affect from the early childhood experience of the body before inside and outside are established, in a simultaneity of presence and absence, and the parallel to fetishization lead to the assumption that one might

see, in what Marie-Luise Angerer calls the desire for affect, a fetishization of the affective body.

In this sense, the desire for affect represents a tendency to fetishize. The affective moment and its promise of immediacy delineate a picture, or better: an experience of suspended distance.

As Bhabha puts it: “the reactivation of primal fantasy—the subject’s desire for a pure origin.”

What is staged by affect is the fetishization of the body as a figure contrasting the subject and the politics of differentiation.

If in the beginning there was mention of the affective as a place of failure, then because affect, in its opposition to the subject and to representation, mistakes the role of fetishization, that ties affect back into the symbolic structure. Viewed from this perspective, affect is not a body experience located outside and preceding the subject, but part of an imaginary order. If affect is supposed to mean that experiences and feelings are located outside the subject, then the idea that the revisiting of the body leads to a body that no longer has anything to do with the early childhood body is mistaken. Out of place revisited.

To what extent does the desire for affect methodically revive a colonial notion of the subject and the body, even if the conditions have nothing to do with colonialism? This question remains to be considered. In the place of colonialism there is the suspension of the discrete and differentiated subjects of colonizer and colonized, both integrated in one and the same subject. This consequently would lead to the subject described earlier, a subject perceiving itself in a quasi-colonial way and exposing the alien in itself through affect. Arguments for affect thus confirm not the unknown aspect of the subject conjured in analogy to a Freudian “return of the repressed,” but exactly the alienation of the subject as subject, or the alienation of the subject because of its status as a subject. The paradox seems to lie in the fact that this alienation through the status of the subject in a certain sense, by way of affect, brings that subject to the fore. From the perspective of the Freudian uncanny, it is only the too familiar that emerged unexpectedly, the subject itself. In analogy to Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s reading of Lacan, which leads him to conclude that “the object emerges ˇizˇek, 1991, 85), through the search for it” (Z one would have to change the formulation for

the desire for affect—it is now the subject that emerges by searching for it.

I think that Marie-Luise Angerer’s description of affect as dispositive can not only be confirmed but can also be expanded with the related fetishization of the body in the cultural and medial desire for affect. The range of articulations of the desire for affect in everyday culture that I listed earlier—in wellness and fitness culture as well as in the media-based entertainment industry—works with this fetishization of the body, and affect is nothing more than the medium by which the legitimization of this body fetishization is to be communicated and rendered plausible.

The fact that the desire for affect is produced and satisfied by and in a wide variety of media turns affect into something that is less of a question in the framework of a discourse on notions of the body, but rather a media-theoretical problem conceiving of the notion of the subject more as a medium than as a body. But this probably would also be a failure, and it is also the wrong place to discuss this now.

Literature Angerer, Marie-Luise, Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt, Berlin, 2007 Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture, London, New York, 1994 Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psycho­ analysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley, 1978.

Green, Renee, Leidige Liebe: My Alien / My Self. Readings at Work, in: Ed. Diedrich Diederichsen, Loving the Alien, Science Fiction Diaspora Multikultur, Berlin, 1998 E nglish: Affective Afflictions: My Alien / My Self. in: Ed. Greg Tate, Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture, New York, 2003 (Due to the tight timeframe for this translation, all quotes in this text are my translation, and not quoted from the English original. UM) Fanon, Frantz, The Fact of Blackness, in: The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, London New York, 1995 Freud, Sigmund, Das Unheimliche, in: Freud, Sigmund, Psychologische Schriften, Band IV, Frankfurt am Main, 1970. English: The Uncanny, London, 2003 Said, Edward W., Am falschen Ort, Autobiografie, Berlin, 2000; English: Out of Place Said, Edward W., Orientalism, London, 1978 Welton, Donn, Affectivity, Eros and the Body, in: Body and Flesh, A Philosophical Reader, Ed. Donn Welton, Oxford 1998 ˇizˇek, Slavoj, Liebe dein Symptom wie Dich selbst! Jacques Z Lacans Psychoanalyse und die Medien, Berlin 1991 The text is the outline of the lecture Out of Place Revisited,

by Andreas Spiegl, held at the symposium Theorie und Affekt, conceptualized by Marie-Luise Angerer and Sabeth Buchmann, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna, January 18, 2008

111

is alien to me? What distinguishes my self from that which it is not and from what lies outside?

Which qualities are alien and in comparison to what?” (Green 1998, 146). What is being addressed here is the entanglement of two seemingly contradictory relationships to the subject in the notion of affect: the affection and love that can afflict the body can at the same time also—in the heat of the moment—infect the body, making it appear affectively diseased or alien. In this sense the (affliction of) affection and the alien are not mutually exclusive, but can even blur into each other. So to affectively experience affection can result in feeling alien to oneself, in feelings of alienation—My Alien, My Self. Myself, an Alien.

The question raised by Green here has also, as early as 1952, been described as a central experience by Frantz Fanon. Even if this story is one of the foundational texts of postcolonial theory and can be considered overly familiar, I’d like to quote it once more, specifically in order to point to the blurry transition between the “affection” for a subject and the “alienation” of the body.

The story tells about a small child who encounters Fanon, turns to the mother, and says: “Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile.

“Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me. [this much about affection] “Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement.

“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened!

Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible …

My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly, look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, … the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones.

(Fanon, 1995, 323f.) [this much about alienation]

Fanon describes here in detail the transition from affection (an external stimulus that flicked over me) to an affective experience of the body as alien body (My body was given back to me sprawled out … that cold that goes through your bones). A few lines further down he concludes: “I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. … I am fixed. … I am laid bare. I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in but a new kind of man, a new genus.” (Fanon, 1995, 325).

110

I think that the effective mechanism of affect cannot be described more adequately than with the words “overdetermined from without. I am laid bare. I feel.” Outside and inside blur, the alien and the familiar correlate at this point.

In order to clarify, I’d like to quote once more Donn Welton’s description of the affective in early childhood narcissism: “It involves a relation to the Other but one in which the Other is so within that he or she cannot be experienced as without.”

And she continues with a quotation from Nancy Chodorov’s book The Reproduction of Mothering that could be a downright commentary on Fanon’s anecdote: “It is ‘an unintended consequence of the infant’s lack of reality sense and perception of its mother as separate’” (Welton 1998, 198). Affect and the perception of another, or of difference, of an Other, seamlessly blur into one another. In the moment of affect, the difference established between the self and the other is simultaneously confirmed and suspended.

In his book The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha refers to the passage from Fanon quoted above. He suggests a reading that establishes a connection of the relation of the difference between self and other and their simultaneous blurring with fetishization. It is characteristic for the fetish to represent both the absent and the present. “Within discourse, the fetish represents the simultaneous play between metaphor as substitution (masking absence and difference) and metonymy (which contiguously registers the perceived lack). The fetish or stereotype gives access to an ‘identity’ which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defense, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in recognition of difference and disavowal of it. This conflict of pleasure / unpleasure, absence / presence, has a fundamental signification for colonial discourse. For the scene of fetishism is also the scene of the reactivation and repetition of primal fantasy—the subject’s desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by its division” (Bhabha, 1994, 74).

The theoretical deduction of affect from the early childhood experience of the body before inside and outside are established, in a simultaneity of presence and absence, and the parallel to fetishization lead to the assumption that one might

see, in what Marie-Luise Angerer calls the desire for affect, a fetishization of the affective body.

In this sense, the desire for affect represents a tendency to fetishize. The affective moment and its promise of immediacy delineate a picture, or better: an experience of suspended distance.

As Bhabha puts it: “the reactivation of primal fantasy—the subject’s desire for a pure origin.”

What is staged by affect is the fetishization of the body as a figure contrasting the subject and the politics of differentiation.

If in the beginning there was mention of the affective as a place of failure, then because affect, in its opposition to the subject and to representation, mistakes the role of fetishization, that ties affect back into the symbolic structure. Viewed from this perspective, affect is not a body experience located outside and preceding the subject, but part of an imaginary order. If affect is supposed to mean that experiences and feelings are located outside the subject, then the idea that the revisiting of the body leads to a body that no longer has anything to do with the early childhood body is mistaken. Out of place revisited.

To what extent does the desire for affect methodically revive a colonial notion of the subject and the body, even if the conditions have nothing to do with colonialism? This question remains to be considered. In the place of colonialism there is the suspension of the discrete and differentiated subjects of colonizer and colonized, both integrated in one and the same subject. This consequently would lead to the subject described earlier, a subject perceiving itself in a quasi-colonial way and exposing the alien in itself through affect. Arguments for affect thus confirm not the unknown aspect of the subject conjured in analogy to a Freudian “return of the repressed,” but exactly the alienation of the subject as subject, or the alienation of the subject because of its status as a subject. The paradox seems to lie in the fact that this alienation through the status of the subject in a certain sense, by way of affect, brings that subject to the fore. From the perspective of the Freudian uncanny, it is only the too familiar that emerged unexpectedly, the subject itself. In analogy to Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s reading of Lacan, which leads him to conclude that “the object emerges ˇizˇek, 1991, 85), through the search for it” (Z one would have to change the formulation for

the desire for affect—it is now the subject that emerges by searching for it.

I think that Marie-Luise Angerer’s description of affect as dispositive can not only be confirmed but can also be expanded with the related fetishization of the body in the cultural and medial desire for affect. The range of articulations of the desire for affect in everyday culture that I listed earlier—in wellness and fitness culture as well as in the media-based entertainment industry—works with this fetishization of the body, and affect is nothing more than the medium by which the legitimization of this body fetishization is to be communicated and rendered plausible.

The fact that the desire for affect is produced and satisfied by and in a wide variety of media turns affect into something that is less of a question in the framework of a discourse on notions of the body, but rather a media-theoretical problem conceiving of the notion of the subject more as a medium than as a body. But this probably would also be a failure, and it is also the wrong place to discuss this now.

Literature Angerer, Marie-Luise, Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt, Berlin, 2007 Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture, London, New York, 1994 Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psycho­ analysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley, 1978.

Green, Renee, Leidige Liebe: My Alien / My Self. Readings at Work, in: Ed. Diedrich Diederichsen, Loving the Alien, Science Fiction Diaspora Multikultur, Berlin, 1998 E nglish: Affective Afflictions: My Alien / My Self. in: Ed. Greg Tate, Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture, New York, 2003 (Due to the tight timeframe for this translation, all quotes in this text are my translation, and not quoted from the English original. UM) Fanon, Frantz, The Fact of Blackness, in: The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, London New York, 1995 Freud, Sigmund, Das Unheimliche, in: Freud, Sigmund, Psychologische Schriften, Band IV, Frankfurt am Main, 1970. English: The Uncanny, London, 2003 Said, Edward W., Am falschen Ort, Autobiografie, Berlin, 2000; English: Out of Place Said, Edward W., Orientalism, London, 1978 Welton, Donn, Affectivity, Eros and the Body, in: Body and Flesh, A Philosophical Reader, Ed. Donn Welton, Oxford 1998 ˇizˇek, Slavoj, Liebe dein Symptom wie Dich selbst! Jacques Z Lacans Psychoanalyse und die Medien, Berlin 1991 The text is the outline of the lecture Out of Place Revisited,

by Andreas Spiegl, held at the symposium Theorie und Affekt, conceptualized by Marie-Luise Angerer and Sabeth Buchmann, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna, January 18, 2008

111

* 1966 in New York, USA Daily Mirror, 2006 Silkscreen on mirror 37.3 x 29.2 x 0.5 cm Edition 2/5 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Jonathan Horowitz investigates and confuses the projected/medial images of the popular figure Kate Moss using the typography from the infamous Cocaine Kate issue of the Daily ­Mirror, printed atop an actual mirror. The white milkscreen ink on the mirror appears as cocaine. By putting a (self-) reflection at the centre of his Daily Mirror the artist plays with the aesthetics of the absence of its once iconic then emptied and refilled centre. The piece interprets Kate Moss as a mirror through which anybody’s desires and ambitions could be reflected. It’s the commercial photographer who makes sure Kate Moss remains both: one of us, and something else completely, a collective icon. The popularity of the iconic figure and its illustration as image naturally distorts the line between its privacy and publicity and necessarily creates a multiple projected image of its subject/object. The viewer becomes an archaeologist searching the traces of the remains of the familiar—through his/her own projection.

* 1966 in New York, USA Daily Mirror, 2006 Silkscreen on mirror 37.3 x 29.2 x 0.5 cm Edition 2/5 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Jonathan Horowitz investigates and confuses the projected/medial images of the popular figure Kate Moss using the typography from the infamous Cocaine Kate issue of the Daily ­Mirror, printed atop an actual mirror. The white milkscreen ink on the mirror appears as cocaine. By putting a (self-) reflection at the centre of his Daily Mirror the artist plays with the aesthetics of the absence of its once iconic then emptied and refilled centre. The piece interprets Kate Moss as a mirror through which anybody’s desires and ambitions could be reflected. It’s the commercial photographer who makes sure Kate Moss remains both: one of us, and something else completely, a collective icon. The popularity of the iconic figure and its illustration as image naturally distorts the line between its privacy and publicity and necessarily creates a multiple projected image of its subject/object. The viewer becomes an archaeologist searching the traces of the remains of the familiar—through his/her own projection.

*1973 in Helsinki, Finland Pain, Pleasure, Guilt, 2000 C-print (Series of 5 photographs) Edition 5/5 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

*1973 in Helsinki, Finland Pain, Pleasure, Guilt, 2000 C-print (Series of 5 photographs) Edition 5/5 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Pain, Pleasure, Guilt Soraya Rodríguez

Salla Tykkä makes photographs and short 35mm “Seeds that were sown during the making of My films with narratives characterized by a female Hate is Useless can be traced, albeit in a more protagonist. Concerned with issues of identity, lateral way, in her later pieces. Exercise, for exfantasy and power her work functions simultane- ample, is a recurring theme in many of the works, ously as an exploration of self-portraiture and a from the boxing in Power to the girl returning vehicle for cultural analysis. Pain, Pleasure, Guilt from a run in Lasso. Significantly, many recent is a series of photographs that express an inner works relate closely to the Finnish context of the world of sexuality, awakening and longing. A figartist’s home, from the architecture of summer ure presses up against a window silhouetted behouses to the snow-covered landscape. In conhind a sunlit curtain engrossed in private yearnversation, Tykkä has identified the photographs of ing for something outside the haven of home. A the Pain, Pleasure, Guilt series as an important girl lies face down on a bed naked and alone moment for considering the interface between but for the nude couple on a television screen. inside and outside. Often alluded to through the A young woman pulls a fur blanket over heruse of windows as a physical but transparent self—we wonder why and from whom she hides barrier, distinct from the typical metaphor of behind the tactile fur with its fetish connotations. public and private, she describes this more as a On a studio floor, a girl lies eyes closed holding desire to escape from an inside.”* a shutter trigger in her hand to photograph the invisible reverie that immobilizes her. Composi* Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt, Salla Tykkä: A Reverse ­Chronology, in: Salla Tykkä, NIFCA, Helsinki, 2001, p. 7 tionally restrained, yet emotionally intense these images express something of the vulnerability, excitement and trepidation that characterizes the twilight years of adolescence. On the surface it may seem that not much is happening, given the simplicity of the narrative, yet beneath the exterior very deliberate attention is being paid to the psychological shift or transformation in the protagonist. Tykkä’s work offers a dynamic similar to that of fairytales: where the lure of adventure is darkened by undertones that foreshadow the complexities and dangers of life. A trilogy of films with a sense of the epic, Lasso (2000) Thriller (2001) and Cave (2003) further explores the themes and mythology of the rites of passage of a young girl from childhood to adulthood.

116

117

Pain, Pleasure, Guilt Soraya Rodríguez

Salla Tykkä makes photographs and short 35mm “Seeds that were sown during the making of My films with narratives characterized by a female Hate is Useless can be traced, albeit in a more protagonist. Concerned with issues of identity, lateral way, in her later pieces. Exercise, for exfantasy and power her work functions simultane- ample, is a recurring theme in many of the works, ously as an exploration of self-portraiture and a from the boxing in Power to the girl returning vehicle for cultural analysis. Pain, Pleasure, Guilt from a run in Lasso. Significantly, many recent is a series of photographs that express an inner works relate closely to the Finnish context of the world of sexuality, awakening and longing. A figartist’s home, from the architecture of summer ure presses up against a window silhouetted behouses to the snow-covered landscape. In conhind a sunlit curtain engrossed in private yearnversation, Tykkä has identified the photographs of ing for something outside the haven of home. A the Pain, Pleasure, Guilt series as an important girl lies face down on a bed naked and alone moment for considering the interface between but for the nude couple on a television screen. inside and outside. Often alluded to through the A young woman pulls a fur blanket over heruse of windows as a physical but transparent self—we wonder why and from whom she hides barrier, distinct from the typical metaphor of behind the tactile fur with its fetish connotations. public and private, she describes this more as a On a studio floor, a girl lies eyes closed holding desire to escape from an inside.”* a shutter trigger in her hand to photograph the invisible reverie that immobilizes her. Composi* Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt, Salla Tykkä: A Reverse ­Chronology, in: Salla Tykkä, NIFCA, Helsinki, 2001, p. 7 tionally restrained, yet emotionally intense these images express something of the vulnerability, excitement and trepidation that characterizes the twilight years of adolescence. On the surface it may seem that not much is happening, given the simplicity of the narrative, yet beneath the exterior very deliberate attention is being paid to the psychological shift or transformation in the protagonist. Tykkä’s work offers a dynamic similar to that of fairytales: where the lure of adventure is darkened by undertones that foreshadow the complexities and dangers of life. A trilogy of films with a sense of the epic, Lasso (2000) Thriller (2001) and Cave (2003) further explores the themes and mythology of the rites of passage of a young girl from childhood to adulthood.

116

117

*1964 in New Delhi, India The Lightning Testimonies, 2007 8-channel video installation 32 min 31 sec, color and b/w, sound Edition 1/6 Co-produced by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

*1964 in New Delhi, India The Lightning Testimonies, 2007 8-channel video installation 32 min 31 sec, color and b/w, sound Edition 1/6 Co-produced by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

The Lightning Testimonies Amar Kanwar

Is there a reason to remember? Why are some images different from the others? Why does an image seem to contain many secrets? What is it that can release them so as to connect with many unknown lives?

Is there an image there for that look in his eye, the look that maybe I know the meaning of? That little halt, a brief sigh inside the eye.

The steam disappeared from the windowpane of that little room into the sunlight that shines on the new lemon green leaves that I now suddenly see.

I realize then that it had rained through the night.

That I had been lost in that look longer than I knew. Is there an image for that look in your eye, the look that maybe I know the meaning of?

It was my mother’s birthday, I knew but I had forgotten that it was her 70th. Is there an image for that forgetting?

Thet Win Aung was a student leader in Burma.

The military sentenced him to 59 years in prison.

Is there an image for the length of that sentence?

They met for an hour not knowing that they will never meet again. Is there an image for the realization 15 years later that that was the last meeting?

The hypocrisy of his beautiful car screams down the highway as it races through the yellow mustard fields, watched by the farmer’s sons and ignored by the visiting purple moor hens that were busy finding food in the wet soil. Is there an image for the scream?

They created an image that was meant to lie. They then created another image to convince me about the truth of that lie. They obliterated every dream I had, my home, my love, my family, my land, my 122

trees, my river. They annihilated every sign of my ancestors. They disregarded every plea and discredited my anger. Is there an image for the hope that still lies in my heart? Is there an image for the fear that refuses to leave their heart?

If the image comes from the mind’s eye then can it ever be separated from the food that was cooked last night when he began to tell the story of that day when everything seemed lost and a strange sinking feeling took over… in the story … they waited doing nothing, endlessly, unable to even express their grief when one day there was a knock on the door. The little girl, who was now big, opened the door. She came in, took a step and then stood silently and wept as her eyes saw all of us sitting staring at her. Happiness had returned and the blood began to flow inside our bodies again.

Is there an unseen line through the center of the dancers body? What happens to her when she finds it during a performance?

Is a film a series of still images? Is life a series of still moments where each moment contains time, birth and death and does time keep oscillating back and forth through every moment even as it moves ahead towards a destination.

Or maybe time has no end and it continues on forever.

Or maybe it’s a revolving ellipse of a million layers, each layer marginally displaced from the other with lives repeating at different times.

Or maybe time occasionally leaves behind something. Is there a way to see that which seems to have disappeared but hasn’t. Is there a reason to remember?

The image is that icon within which the blood flows. Within which memories oscillate relentlessly and silently between the past and the future.

Our gaze being the present. We and the image together become the totem for the story telling to begin between her ancestors and the squirrel on the branch outside your window. To read the image means to resonate with this dialogue between memory and time. But in every direction.

But not everyone archives in the same way. so maybe time does not move in a straight line. Maybe it can also originate from points and spread in many directions even as it moves forwards and back wards. Like a forest and its inhabitants remembering so as to allow the seasons to burn, moisten and freeze memories in cyclical dialogue.

Constantly interconnecting. So every revelation triggers a cascade of revelations. Just like the rain.

For the moment, the rest is bogus. Irrelevant.

Mythical facades of color and light. Like a series of mirages manufactured by a profit making monster. Is it not so? So many images surround us continuously eating away at our insides so that we lose the sense of what is real and important.

So that every word begins to have two meanings.

It’s real meaning and its opposite as well. So eventually you do not know what to believe and so all beliefs become meaningless.

It was 47 degrees when we reached. The young boy said this is it. This is where we have to go.

The driver looked around incredulously. Surprised and confused and then silently withdrew to let others do what they want to do. Can we go under that tree, in the shade, for a while. Yes. We could. In a little while the hot air suddenly rose up silently taking with it a handful of dry leaves.

A mini tornado like swirl just about 10 feet high.

A spray of dust levitating vertically below the leaves. Was it a message since we had just arrived? Only for a lunatic the boy replied with scorn in his eyes.

Is there a reason to remember? Why are some images different from the others? Why does an image seem to contain many secrets? What is it that can release them so as to connect with many unknown lives.

If I find the ordinary icon, the secrets that lie within that image, the dialogues that reside there then do I find meaning for my self? If I find meaning then my audience finds meaning as well.

The two meanings, mine and theirs will never be the same and should not as well. When I find myself the audience finds themselves too.

One hour later. Now in the small forest. Silent, probably because of the white heat of the afternoon. Again everything dry, brown, about to crackle. Another quiet gust of wind. A vertical swirl of air, leaves and dust but this time twice as high. Almost as high as the trees. Still not a message—I asked? Yes the boy smiled and admitted.

It is , it’s a salaam, what else can it be.

Is there an image for the space that exists

between the eye of the witness and the scene of crime. Can the witness be a tree? Can I draw a graph marking the dates of her trial in court on the silhouette of the hill where she hid?

Is there an image for the afternoon, evening and night and for that which is spoken and unspoken, there but not there, to be remembered but to be forgotten continuously. For the survivor who is still hiding. Is there an image for hiding?

Just the day before, she won her case, after five years in court the judge finally convicted the 12 accused for murder and rape. I saw her on the television in a press conference. She was in a burka. Confident.

Sometimes its hard to tell and impossible to retain as well. Finally I tell but you are then sworn to secrecy. Now I rest while you burn with my secret. So you change its clothes, my name, the appearance of the characters, the geography of the location , even the language of your story is new so that the secret can be reborn. Then it comes out into the public. In disguise. Its actually mine but now reborn so also now yours. Is there an image that can trace the route of the bird flying in the sky.

How to talk about pain? Is there an image for what lies behind suffering? When you wove that sarong in memory of her murder why did you make the patterns so beautiful and the colors so vivid. You spoke of her and your design with so much love that I think I have to thank you for helping me to find my own words and pictures.

Everyone recalls differently. Individuals and communities. Differently alone and differently together. Maybe in words or in songs and stories, probably in gestures, little pencil marks or simply in a look. Maybe it can be recalled but only through that stone under the tree or in the tangent that lies in the new jewelry that was bought just yesterday. Or the wooden kitchen window from where she said to her child—that’s from where we saw them take auntie down the street.

Fifty-seven years ago. So the child remembers of course but auntie resides in the wooden window for eternity. That wooden window is the container of that morning fifty seven years ago and of every single day in time since then. Forwards and backwards. Forever. You, me, auntie, the niece and the child all together.

123

The Lightning Testimonies Amar Kanwar

Is there a reason to remember? Why are some images different from the others? Why does an image seem to contain many secrets? What is it that can release them so as to connect with many unknown lives?

Is there an image there for that look in his eye, the look that maybe I know the meaning of? That little halt, a brief sigh inside the eye.

The steam disappeared from the windowpane of that little room into the sunlight that shines on the new lemon green leaves that I now suddenly see.

I realize then that it had rained through the night.

That I had been lost in that look longer than I knew. Is there an image for that look in your eye, the look that maybe I know the meaning of?

It was my mother’s birthday, I knew but I had forgotten that it was her 70th. Is there an image for that forgetting?

Thet Win Aung was a student leader in Burma.

The military sentenced him to 59 years in prison.

Is there an image for the length of that sentence?

They met for an hour not knowing that they will never meet again. Is there an image for the realization 15 years later that that was the last meeting?

The hypocrisy of his beautiful car screams down the highway as it races through the yellow mustard fields, watched by the farmer’s sons and ignored by the visiting purple moor hens that were busy finding food in the wet soil. Is there an image for the scream?

They created an image that was meant to lie. They then created another image to convince me about the truth of that lie. They obliterated every dream I had, my home, my love, my family, my land, my 122

trees, my river. They annihilated every sign of my ancestors. They disregarded every plea and discredited my anger. Is there an image for the hope that still lies in my heart? Is there an image for the fear that refuses to leave their heart?

If the image comes from the mind’s eye then can it ever be separated from the food that was cooked last night when he began to tell the story of that day when everything seemed lost and a strange sinking feeling took over… in the story … they waited doing nothing, endlessly, unable to even express their grief when one day there was a knock on the door. The little girl, who was now big, opened the door. She came in, took a step and then stood silently and wept as her eyes saw all of us sitting staring at her. Happiness had returned and the blood began to flow inside our bodies again.

Is there an unseen line through the center of the dancers body? What happens to her when she finds it during a performance?

Is a film a series of still images? Is life a series of still moments where each moment contains time, birth and death and does time keep oscillating back and forth through every moment even as it moves ahead towards a destination.

Or maybe time has no end and it continues on forever.

Or maybe it’s a revolving ellipse of a million layers, each layer marginally displaced from the other with lives repeating at different times.

Or maybe time occasionally leaves behind something. Is there a way to see that which seems to have disappeared but hasn’t. Is there a reason to remember?

The image is that icon within which the blood flows. Within which memories oscillate relentlessly and silently between the past and the future.

Our gaze being the present. We and the image together become the totem for the story telling to begin between her ancestors and the squirrel on the branch outside your window. To read the image means to resonate with this dialogue between memory and time. But in every direction.

But not everyone archives in the same way. so maybe time does not move in a straight line. Maybe it can also originate from points and spread in many directions even as it moves forwards and back wards. Like a forest and its inhabitants remembering so as to allow the seasons to burn, moisten and freeze memories in cyclical dialogue.

Constantly interconnecting. So every revelation triggers a cascade of revelations. Just like the rain.

For the moment, the rest is bogus. Irrelevant.

Mythical facades of color and light. Like a series of mirages manufactured by a profit making monster. Is it not so? So many images surround us continuously eating away at our insides so that we lose the sense of what is real and important.

So that every word begins to have two meanings.

It’s real meaning and its opposite as well. So eventually you do not know what to believe and so all beliefs become meaningless.

It was 47 degrees when we reached. The young boy said this is it. This is where we have to go.

The driver looked around incredulously. Surprised and confused and then silently withdrew to let others do what they want to do. Can we go under that tree, in the shade, for a while. Yes. We could. In a little while the hot air suddenly rose up silently taking with it a handful of dry leaves.

A mini tornado like swirl just about 10 feet high.

A spray of dust levitating vertically below the leaves. Was it a message since we had just arrived? Only for a lunatic the boy replied with scorn in his eyes.

Is there a reason to remember? Why are some images different from the others? Why does an image seem to contain many secrets? What is it that can release them so as to connect with many unknown lives.

If I find the ordinary icon, the secrets that lie within that image, the dialogues that reside there then do I find meaning for my self? If I find meaning then my audience finds meaning as well.

The two meanings, mine and theirs will never be the same and should not as well. When I find myself the audience finds themselves too.

One hour later. Now in the small forest. Silent, probably because of the white heat of the afternoon. Again everything dry, brown, about to crackle. Another quiet gust of wind. A vertical swirl of air, leaves and dust but this time twice as high. Almost as high as the trees. Still not a message—I asked? Yes the boy smiled and admitted.

It is , it’s a salaam, what else can it be.

Is there an image for the space that exists

between the eye of the witness and the scene of crime. Can the witness be a tree? Can I draw a graph marking the dates of her trial in court on the silhouette of the hill where she hid?

Is there an image for the afternoon, evening and night and for that which is spoken and unspoken, there but not there, to be remembered but to be forgotten continuously. For the survivor who is still hiding. Is there an image for hiding?

Just the day before, she won her case, after five years in court the judge finally convicted the 12 accused for murder and rape. I saw her on the television in a press conference. She was in a burka. Confident.

Sometimes its hard to tell and impossible to retain as well. Finally I tell but you are then sworn to secrecy. Now I rest while you burn with my secret. So you change its clothes, my name, the appearance of the characters, the geography of the location , even the language of your story is new so that the secret can be reborn. Then it comes out into the public. In disguise. Its actually mine but now reborn so also now yours. Is there an image that can trace the route of the bird flying in the sky.

How to talk about pain? Is there an image for what lies behind suffering? When you wove that sarong in memory of her murder why did you make the patterns so beautiful and the colors so vivid. You spoke of her and your design with so much love that I think I have to thank you for helping me to find my own words and pictures.

Everyone recalls differently. Individuals and communities. Differently alone and differently together. Maybe in words or in songs and stories, probably in gestures, little pencil marks or simply in a look. Maybe it can be recalled but only through that stone under the tree or in the tangent that lies in the new jewelry that was bought just yesterday. Or the wooden kitchen window from where she said to her child—that’s from where we saw them take auntie down the street.

Fifty-seven years ago. So the child remembers of course but auntie resides in the wooden window for eternity. That wooden window is the container of that morning fifty seven years ago and of every single day in time since then. Forwards and backwards. Forever. You, me, auntie, the niece and the child all together.

123

*1962 in Grabs/Rheintal, Switzerland Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions), 2001 Audio-video installation Moving projection: 21 min 51 sec, fixed projection: 15 min 13 sec, color, sound Edition 1/3 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

*1962 in Grabs/Rheintal, Switzerland Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions), 2001 Audio-video installation Moving projection: 21 min 51 sec, fixed projection: 15 min 13 sec, color, sound Edition 1/3 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions) Daniela Zyman Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions) is a component of a larger installation exhibited in Show a Leg at Tramway, Glasgow, and presented on its own at the Yokohama Triennial, both exhibitions are referred to in the title. As in many of Pipilotti Rist’s work, there is an overlap from one piece to the other, as she remixes, re-edits and re-installs images, sounds, and objects. In a dark space fragmented video sequences are projected onto an arrangement of used white net curtains. A second projection appears on a wall. The viewer moves between the images that include two women walking in the street wearing high heels and knee-length skirts, a naked woman crouching on the floor and jumping across a doctor’s office, a woman smearing her make-up against a window, gas burners rotating like abstract haloes, dandelions moving in the breeze, a TV monitor burning, and more, all to the backdrop of percussion rhythms and a mix of dreamy and ethereal tones at times irritated by the subtle laughter of a girl.

In the early 1990s, the focus of Rist’s work shifted from single channel videos to multi-channel installations. Using display formats that collapse the space between the viewer and the image, she fills her environments with streams of images and soundscape. Drawing from diverse sources—contemporary video art, commercial film, self-appropriation and recycling of her own imagery—Rist is fluent in a visual language that exuberantly embraces aspects of mass media and experimental video, establishing a dialogue of reproduction and displacement.

Architecture, time and the role of video as an element of spatial installation are central to the artist’s work. Architecture, objects, and furnishing become projection surfaces for the images, a material support for the electronic picture.

“Today, the mediated picture is very present but it’s still caught in a box”, describes Rist, “that interested me—how it could melt: moving pictures with three-dimensional life.” At the same time, the confrontation of the physical space and the illusionary space of images creates the plasticity of her visual language. As producer, director and performer, Rist invents her own imaginary spaces that envelop the viewer like a compelling invitation to play voyeur to someone else’s daydream.

128

In Related Legs the entire space is hung with (found) net curtains of all different shapes and sizes, suspended by wire or thread at different heights from the ceiling. Rist projects her videos on to the walls, the floors and these delicate hangings. There is no one viewpoint from which to see Rist’s all-enveloping environment. You have to wander at random through the labyrinth of curtains, pushing them aside as you trail after spotlights or images as they appear and disappear over every conceivable surface in the gallery.

The video projectors are mounted on revolving mirror scanners, so that the image rotates in space. Figures appear over landscapes and flowers to create palimpsests, and nothing stays still long enough for you to feel that you’ve grasped its meaning or taken it in. Time and space break down, scale is distorted, figurative elements merge into abstraction, so that you are left in a hallucinogenic ethereal space, surrounded in sensual colors and psychedelic sounds. Rist is not interested in representing reality. Hers is a landscape of thoughts, feelings and the subconscious where memories, sensations and reflections combine as shifting, dissolving layers of impermanence—fragile and bittersweet.

Women, femininity and feminism have been at the core of Rist’s works such as the underwater (auto)-erotic fantasy Sip My Ocean (1996) to her depiction of a woman joyfully smashing car windshields with an iron flower (Ever Is Over All, 1997). Femininity is the starting point for discordant beings who fall, scream, grimace, smash or float, seeking to redefine norms of traditional representations of women. In Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions), she utilizes archetypes—woman as naked figure; the glamorous pin-up look; the mad and hysterical woman—but departs radically from them by never revealing these women’s stories, their secrets and motivations. Just as you think you’re tracing a narrative, the image dissolves and moves on. Rist disperses her images through the space—they pop up before you and eerily follow you through the gauzy maze of nets.

To this she adds a dreamy, ambient soundscape: bursts of girls’ laughter, percussive rhythms, snatches of melody.

First published in: ein-leuchten, Ed. Daniela Zyman / T-B A21, Vienna, 2004, pp. 130-133

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Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions) Daniela Zyman Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions) is a component of a larger installation exhibited in Show a Leg at Tramway, Glasgow, and presented on its own at the Yokohama Triennial, both exhibitions are referred to in the title. As in many of Pipilotti Rist’s work, there is an overlap from one piece to the other, as she remixes, re-edits and re-installs images, sounds, and objects. In a dark space fragmented video sequences are projected onto an arrangement of used white net curtains. A second projection appears on a wall. The viewer moves between the images that include two women walking in the street wearing high heels and knee-length skirts, a naked woman crouching on the floor and jumping across a doctor’s office, a woman smearing her make-up against a window, gas burners rotating like abstract haloes, dandelions moving in the breeze, a TV monitor burning, and more, all to the backdrop of percussion rhythms and a mix of dreamy and ethereal tones at times irritated by the subtle laughter of a girl.

In the early 1990s, the focus of Rist’s work shifted from single channel videos to multi-channel installations. Using display formats that collapse the space between the viewer and the image, she fills her environments with streams of images and soundscape. Drawing from diverse sources—contemporary video art, commercial film, self-appropriation and recycling of her own imagery—Rist is fluent in a visual language that exuberantly embraces aspects of mass media and experimental video, establishing a dialogue of reproduction and displacement.

Architecture, time and the role of video as an element of spatial installation are central to the artist’s work. Architecture, objects, and furnishing become projection surfaces for the images, a material support for the electronic picture.

“Today, the mediated picture is very present but it’s still caught in a box”, describes Rist, “that interested me—how it could melt: moving pictures with three-dimensional life.” At the same time, the confrontation of the physical space and the illusionary space of images creates the plasticity of her visual language. As producer, director and performer, Rist invents her own imaginary spaces that envelop the viewer like a compelling invitation to play voyeur to someone else’s daydream.

128

In Related Legs the entire space is hung with (found) net curtains of all different shapes and sizes, suspended by wire or thread at different heights from the ceiling. Rist projects her videos on to the walls, the floors and these delicate hangings. There is no one viewpoint from which to see Rist’s all-enveloping environment. You have to wander at random through the labyrinth of curtains, pushing them aside as you trail after spotlights or images as they appear and disappear over every conceivable surface in the gallery.

The video projectors are mounted on revolving mirror scanners, so that the image rotates in space. Figures appear over landscapes and flowers to create palimpsests, and nothing stays still long enough for you to feel that you’ve grasped its meaning or taken it in. Time and space break down, scale is distorted, figurative elements merge into abstraction, so that you are left in a hallucinogenic ethereal space, surrounded in sensual colors and psychedelic sounds. Rist is not interested in representing reality. Hers is a landscape of thoughts, feelings and the subconscious where memories, sensations and reflections combine as shifting, dissolving layers of impermanence—fragile and bittersweet.

Women, femininity and feminism have been at the core of Rist’s works such as the underwater (auto)-erotic fantasy Sip My Ocean (1996) to her depiction of a woman joyfully smashing car windshields with an iron flower (Ever Is Over All, 1997). Femininity is the starting point for discordant beings who fall, scream, grimace, smash or float, seeking to redefine norms of traditional representations of women. In Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions), she utilizes archetypes—woman as naked figure; the glamorous pin-up look; the mad and hysterical woman—but departs radically from them by never revealing these women’s stories, their secrets and motivations. Just as you think you’re tracing a narrative, the image dissolves and moves on. Rist disperses her images through the space—they pop up before you and eerily follow you through the gauzy maze of nets.

To this she adds a dreamy, ambient soundscape: bursts of girls’ laughter, percussive rhythms, snatches of melody.

First published in: ein-leuchten, Ed. Daniela Zyman / T-B A21, Vienna, 2004, pp. 130-133

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Questions to Pipilotti Rist (in fever) on Related Legs Daniela Zyman

A key aspect of this exhibition is the investigation of the notion of the private space, understood as an oscillation between a sense of our own selfidentity, and an equally acute sense of our dependence on changing, shifting external realities.

What importance does this notion of the private/ the inner have in your work?

I would like to use Winnicott’s concept of potential space to describe the space you have created in Related Legs, a space which is both interiorized and exteriorized—a space which creates a shared reality between the artist, the personae she creates and the viewer. Can you describe that space?

Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions) is a walk-in audio-visual installation that resembles the brain, the consciousness and unconsciousness, what I also call the most private of all private ­spaces.

We humans are a convoluted species: the universe, the earth, national territories, civilization with its anonymous and public spaces, buildings, private spaces, and the body. Those simultaneously active thoughts and associations are symbolized here by the lace curtains hung criss-cross throughout the space as webs to catch the moving video projections. Lace curtains are an everyday means of protection from protruding glances into the private sphere, but at the same time, they allow us our glances onto the city street or the countryside. It’s a situation reminiscent of the mass media phenomenon of the TV (from which I borrowed the technique), but in reverse: everyone sees the moderator, but the moderator sees no one.

The artistic image is always a window onto the soul of the producer, and this means seeing and hearing something, even though ultimately she cannot foresee into what the viewer sees or experiences.

The desire to translate traumatic experiences into one’s private language seems to be re­ appearing in your work. Can you relate to this?

Yes, this is certainly a step towards the motivations of my work, but not the end goal. The work that I show must contain the potential of healing a traumatic experience or at least offer up some hope or consolation so that the universal relevance of the work is sustained.

Opposite page: Extracts from: Francis McKee, Photosynthesizing, in: Show a Leg, Ed. Pipilotti Rist / Francis McKee, Tramway, Glasgow, 2001

131

Questions to Pipilotti Rist (in fever) on Related Legs Daniela Zyman

A key aspect of this exhibition is the investigation of the notion of the private space, understood as an oscillation between a sense of our own selfidentity, and an equally acute sense of our dependence on changing, shifting external realities.

What importance does this notion of the private/ the inner have in your work?

I would like to use Winnicott’s concept of potential space to describe the space you have created in Related Legs, a space which is both interiorized and exteriorized—a space which creates a shared reality between the artist, the personae she creates and the viewer. Can you describe that space?

Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions) is a walk-in audio-visual installation that resembles the brain, the consciousness and unconsciousness, what I also call the most private of all private ­spaces.

We humans are a convoluted species: the universe, the earth, national territories, civilization with its anonymous and public spaces, buildings, private spaces, and the body. Those simultaneously active thoughts and associations are symbolized here by the lace curtains hung criss-cross throughout the space as webs to catch the moving video projections. Lace curtains are an everyday means of protection from protruding glances into the private sphere, but at the same time, they allow us our glances onto the city street or the countryside. It’s a situation reminiscent of the mass media phenomenon of the TV (from which I borrowed the technique), but in reverse: everyone sees the moderator, but the moderator sees no one.

The artistic image is always a window onto the soul of the producer, and this means seeing and hearing something, even though ultimately she cannot foresee into what the viewer sees or experiences.

The desire to translate traumatic experiences into one’s private language seems to be re­ appearing in your work. Can you relate to this?

Yes, this is certainly a step towards the motivations of my work, but not the end goal. The work that I show must contain the potential of healing a traumatic experience or at least offer up some hope or consolation so that the universal relevance of the work is sustained.

Opposite page: Extracts from: Francis McKee, Photosynthesizing, in: Show a Leg, Ed. Pipilotti Rist / Francis McKee, Tramway, Glasgow, 2001

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*1972, Bratislava, Slovakia The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see), 2007 Black and white positive 35mm filmstrips, aluminium bar, light box Dimension variable Edition of 3 Courtesy Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

*1972, Bratislava, Slovakia The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see), 2007 Black and white positive 35mm filmstrips, aluminium bar, light box Dimension variable Edition of 3 Courtesy Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

Ján Mancˇus ˇka The Other Gabrielle Cram

When trying to find their way, people who’ve gotten lost investigate their surroundings in a completely different way than when they’re on a well-known route or following a guide (whether in the form of a map or a person). They notice different components of their surroundings. The streets look different. Perception is disengaged from habit.

Destinations become abstract and take on a personal, emotional—rather than spatial—quality.

If we use lack as a creative principle, the existential feeling of being permanently unfulfilled can become our very identity and inexhaustible initiator of future action.

If we describe our immediate surroundings by concentrating on the character of what is absent in things, turning not to contents but to absence, we arrive at the most precise description we could possibly give.

(Ján Mancˇus ˇka and Vít Havránek )1

The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see) consists of a single row of suspended filmstrips, illuminated by a large-scale light box. It incorporates photodocumentation of a private act produced for public reception. The film itself captures the act of a woman, or wife, covering with black paint all the parts of her husband’s body that he can’t see without using a mirror or other reflective material. His body slowly becomes more and more blackened, and we can see him squirming and becoming agitated as he strains to see the paint. He can feel his body being painted, but as much as he tries, he cannot see it. In the end paint covers most of his face and many parts of his body. The complex boundaries between public and personal spheres are exposed/explored.

Ironically the spaces, or parts, of one’s body that are most public—for example, the face and the neck—as well as those that are most vulnerable or intimate—the spine, the backside—are exactly those that remain off limits to one’s own sight.

Without the use of a mirror, one doesn’t have access to the image projected in public or that seen by one’s intimates.

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Mancˇusˇka works with subtle and multi-layered juxtapositions, disorienting the viewer and disrupting viewing habits and stereotypes, making a generalized common gaze impossible. The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see) hints at the fragmented, uncontrolled access to our bodily self-representations, thus revealing the absurdity of any attempt at completeness, the resulting arbitrariness and the suspicion of potential for non-sense within any such attempt. We experience a confusion of the image, the visual representation, but also a confusion of sight and vision as result of the work’s temporal and spatial dislocations in terms of its representation (action versus documentation; gallery space versus private space and everyday life; what I can see versus what I cannot see). Division and separation work in a manner similar to the effect of filmic suture.2 The linear arrangement of the black-and-white filmstrips further emphasizes the outlined strategy of distraction: a meticulous, serialized process of action and linear documentation alongside poetic, nonsensical gesture. Mancˇusˇka turns pre-existing concepts inside out like the surfaces of a Moebius strip. In The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see), the intimate/personal and its visual/visceral and medial representations—the enactment of the couple, the displayed relationship as well as their images—invoke narratives and (hi-)stories.

Simultaneoulsy attention is drawn to one’s own blind spots; to that which one cannot see, define, or express; to the place and the function one unknowingly has in the (historical/social) process.

In memory, thought doesn’t turn to reality itself, but how that reality was recorded. Working with an all-embracing consciousness of the past and its continuity is impossible. In the context of constant, untraceable changes in the environment and even in one’s own body, memory is obliged to construct a continuous past through a process of selection.3

With all its inscriptions, the body functions as a recorder, a medial space condensing diverse, contradictory, and conflicting (social, political, historical, topographical, ideological, economic, psychological) processes as an archival imprint.

The body works as a frame through which the traces of former processes can be seen; it is a site where diverse experiences encapsulated in its space intermix and manifest themselves. The body works as the medium for constructing/imagining a possible (new) presence.

The concept of absence is to be distinguished from the word emptiness. If a space is empty, it means there’s nothing there. If a particular object is absent, though, reference is made to its unrealized presence; that is, to the fact that it should be there. In this respect, the feeling of absence is an active apprehension of some content through its absence. Absence is what surrounds content.4

The body is an oxymoron, simultaneously and paradoxically incorporating public and private. In The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see) the viewer’s perception is constantly engaged, shifting from one point of view to another, displacing accustomed perspectives, destabilizing positions that appear secure. The perception of a carefully constructed installation slowly shifts to the experience of its conceptual deconstruction, an act of perpetual disintegration. It is a shift from consciousness of the known—that which remains within vision—to the uncanny territories of the unknown/absent. The assumed position as “coherent subject” gets “disrupted” and “shattered.”5 The body—especially the naked, sexual, wounded, diseased body—can mark a site of suppression/off-limits, often censored in its public display (e.g., in films). The dispositive of the suppressed/absent (body) “enables us to glimpse an overlooked continuity in the interstices of apparent discontinuity in the

terms of conjuring up a terrifying excess of cognition, what Jacques Lacan referred to as the knowledge that ‘cannot tolerate one’s knowing that one knows,’“6 the realization that one is surely mistaken at the very moment of comprehension.

1. Ján Mancˇusˇka and Vít Havránek, Absent, Ed. Vít Havránek, tranzit & jrpl | ringier, Zürich, 2006, see texts 2. “Like the childhood mirror, the imaginary completeness that the screen represents, merely serves to disguise an inherent lack. The means by which this imaginary completeness is created is known as suture.”

Paula Murphy, Psychoanalysis and Film Theory Part 1: A New Kind of Mirror, in: Kritikos, Volume 2, February 2005 3. Ján Mancˇusˇka and Vít Havránek, Absent, see texts 4. Ján Mancˇusˇka and Vít Havránek, Absent, see texts 5. Irma Klein, An Architectonics of Responsibility, in: The Films of Amos Gitai. A Montage, Ed. Paul Willemen, ­British Film Institute, London, 1993, p. 29-31 6. Ibid., p. 31, Irma Klein references Jacques Lacan’s Seminar of 19 February 1974, unpublished but quoted in Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1987.

135

Ján Mancˇus ˇka The Other Gabrielle Cram

When trying to find their way, people who’ve gotten lost investigate their surroundings in a completely different way than when they’re on a well-known route or following a guide (whether in the form of a map or a person). They notice different components of their surroundings. The streets look different. Perception is disengaged from habit.

Destinations become abstract and take on a personal, emotional—rather than spatial—quality.

If we use lack as a creative principle, the existential feeling of being permanently unfulfilled can become our very identity and inexhaustible initiator of future action.

If we describe our immediate surroundings by concentrating on the character of what is absent in things, turning not to contents but to absence, we arrive at the most precise description we could possibly give.

(Ján Mancˇus ˇka and Vít Havránek )1

The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see) consists of a single row of suspended filmstrips, illuminated by a large-scale light box. It incorporates photodocumentation of a private act produced for public reception. The film itself captures the act of a woman, or wife, covering with black paint all the parts of her husband’s body that he can’t see without using a mirror or other reflective material. His body slowly becomes more and more blackened, and we can see him squirming and becoming agitated as he strains to see the paint. He can feel his body being painted, but as much as he tries, he cannot see it. In the end paint covers most of his face and many parts of his body. The complex boundaries between public and personal spheres are exposed/explored.

Ironically the spaces, or parts, of one’s body that are most public—for example, the face and the neck—as well as those that are most vulnerable or intimate—the spine, the backside—are exactly those that remain off limits to one’s own sight.

Without the use of a mirror, one doesn’t have access to the image projected in public or that seen by one’s intimates.

134

Mancˇusˇka works with subtle and multi-layered juxtapositions, disorienting the viewer and disrupting viewing habits and stereotypes, making a generalized common gaze impossible. The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see) hints at the fragmented, uncontrolled access to our bodily self-representations, thus revealing the absurdity of any attempt at completeness, the resulting arbitrariness and the suspicion of potential for non-sense within any such attempt. We experience a confusion of the image, the visual representation, but also a confusion of sight and vision as result of the work’s temporal and spatial dislocations in terms of its representation (action versus documentation; gallery space versus private space and everyday life; what I can see versus what I cannot see). Division and separation work in a manner similar to the effect of filmic suture.2 The linear arrangement of the black-and-white filmstrips further emphasizes the outlined strategy of distraction: a meticulous, serialized process of action and linear documentation alongside poetic, nonsensical gesture. Mancˇusˇka turns pre-existing concepts inside out like the surfaces of a Moebius strip. In The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see), the intimate/personal and its visual/visceral and medial representations—the enactment of the couple, the displayed relationship as well as their images—invoke narratives and (hi-)stories.

Simultaneoulsy attention is drawn to one’s own blind spots; to that which one cannot see, define, or express; to the place and the function one unknowingly has in the (historical/social) process.

In memory, thought doesn’t turn to reality itself, but how that reality was recorded. Working with an all-embracing consciousness of the past and its continuity is impossible. In the context of constant, untraceable changes in the environment and even in one’s own body, memory is obliged to construct a continuous past through a process of selection.3

With all its inscriptions, the body functions as a recorder, a medial space condensing diverse, contradictory, and conflicting (social, political, historical, topographical, ideological, economic, psychological) processes as an archival imprint.

The body works as a frame through which the traces of former processes can be seen; it is a site where diverse experiences encapsulated in its space intermix and manifest themselves. The body works as the medium for constructing/imagining a possible (new) presence.

The concept of absence is to be distinguished from the word emptiness. If a space is empty, it means there’s nothing there. If a particular object is absent, though, reference is made to its unrealized presence; that is, to the fact that it should be there. In this respect, the feeling of absence is an active apprehension of some content through its absence. Absence is what surrounds content.4

The body is an oxymoron, simultaneously and paradoxically incorporating public and private. In The Other (I asked my wife to blacken all parts of my body, which I cannot see) the viewer’s perception is constantly engaged, shifting from one point of view to another, displacing accustomed perspectives, destabilizing positions that appear secure. The perception of a carefully constructed installation slowly shifts to the experience of its conceptual deconstruction, an act of perpetual disintegration. It is a shift from consciousness of the known—that which remains within vision—to the uncanny territories of the unknown/absent. The assumed position as “coherent subject” gets “disrupted” and “shattered.”5 The body—especially the naked, sexual, wounded, diseased body—can mark a site of suppression/off-limits, often censored in its public display (e.g., in films). The dispositive of the suppressed/absent (body) “enables us to glimpse an overlooked continuity in the interstices of apparent discontinuity in the

terms of conjuring up a terrifying excess of cognition, what Jacques Lacan referred to as the knowledge that ‘cannot tolerate one’s knowing that one knows,’“6 the realization that one is surely mistaken at the very moment of comprehension.

1. Ján Mancˇusˇka and Vít Havránek, Absent, Ed. Vít Havránek, tranzit & jrpl | ringier, Zürich, 2006, see texts 2. “Like the childhood mirror, the imaginary completeness that the screen represents, merely serves to disguise an inherent lack. The means by which this imaginary completeness is created is known as suture.”

Paula Murphy, Psychoanalysis and Film Theory Part 1: A New Kind of Mirror, in: Kritikos, Volume 2, February 2005 3. Ján Mancˇusˇka and Vít Havránek, Absent, see texts 4. Ján Mancˇusˇka and Vít Havránek, Absent, see texts 5. Irma Klein, An Architectonics of Responsibility, in: The Films of Amos Gitai. A Montage, Ed. Paul Willemen, ­British Film Institute, London, 1993, p. 29-31 6. Ibid., p. 31, Irma Klein references Jacques Lacan’s Seminar of 19 February 1974, unpublished but quoted in Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1987.

135

*1964 in Dubrovnik, Croatia Untitled, 2003 Electric cable with broken bulbs and video documentation of performance 15 min, color, silent Edition 1/3 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Tolj’s projects always refer to his native Dubrovnik—its society, geometry and future. A recurrent theme in his diverse and interventionist practice is the reality of pain, and the conditions of war. He uses art as a cathartic instrument, capable of expressing the many facets of emotion and sensation. His performances radicalize the artistic act by examining the grammar of pain and endurance, surpassing distinctions between the physical and psychological.

In his performance, Dubrovnik-Valencia-Dubrovnik, having recently returned from the battlefield, Tolj undressed to the waist, peeling off 12 layers of clothing. Each layer had black buttons attached, as a memento of perished friends.

From the final layer, Tolj tore off one black button and sewed it directly to his chest—as an ironic medal. Tolj also uses light repeatedly, not only as a metaphor for the pursuit of enlightenment but also, in its paler shades, as entropy and melancholy. In an intervention Line, 8th February 2003 into the City’s Disney-like festive illumination of the Old Harbor, Tolj added a single line of lights, decorating an area of the harbor that had recently collapsed into the sea. Revealing a part of the city expected to remain hidden, his action was intended to undercut the escapist idyll.

In his Untitled performance and video of 2003 Tolj uses the same material, a cable of 39 lights, corresponding to his age at the time, which he wraps around his body. Unwinding the cable, he extinguishes the bulbs one by one as they burn his skin, so that in the end he remains in darkness and silence. The artist describes the action as a reversal of the narrative of his life, exploring ideas of disappearance and suicide whilst also ridding himself of the restrictions of the closed circle of the festively illuminated walls of the City.

(Soraya Rodríguez) 136

137

*1964 in Dubrovnik, Croatia Untitled, 2003 Electric cable with broken bulbs and video documentation of performance 15 min, color, silent Edition 1/3 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Tolj’s projects always refer to his native Dubrovnik—its society, geometry and future. A recurrent theme in his diverse and interventionist practice is the reality of pain, and the conditions of war. He uses art as a cathartic instrument, capable of expressing the many facets of emotion and sensation. His performances radicalize the artistic act by examining the grammar of pain and endurance, surpassing distinctions between the physical and psychological.

In his performance, Dubrovnik-Valencia-Dubrovnik, having recently returned from the battlefield, Tolj undressed to the waist, peeling off 12 layers of clothing. Each layer had black buttons attached, as a memento of perished friends.

From the final layer, Tolj tore off one black button and sewed it directly to his chest—as an ironic medal. Tolj also uses light repeatedly, not only as a metaphor for the pursuit of enlightenment but also, in its paler shades, as entropy and melancholy. In an intervention Line, 8th February 2003 into the City’s Disney-like festive illumination of the Old Harbor, Tolj added a single line of lights, decorating an area of the harbor that had recently collapsed into the sea. Revealing a part of the city expected to remain hidden, his action was intended to undercut the escapist idyll.

In his Untitled performance and video of 2003 Tolj uses the same material, a cable of 39 lights, corresponding to his age at the time, which he wraps around his body. Unwinding the cable, he extinguishes the bulbs one by one as they burn his skin, so that in the end he remains in darkness and silence. The artist describes the action as a reversal of the narrative of his life, exploring ideas of disappearance and suicide whilst also ridding himself of the restrictions of the closed circle of the festively illuminated walls of the City.

(Soraya Rodríguez) 136

137

Other than Yourself— An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space

T-B A21 Chairman: Francesca von Habsburg Curatorial team: Daniela Zyman, Gabrielle Cram Exhibition architect: Philipp Krummel Collection Management: Barbara Horvath Publications: Eva Ebersberger Exhibition team: Alexandra Hennig, Evelyn Wysoudil, Beate Lex, Markus Schlüter, Mikael Horstmann, David Weidinger, Verena Platzgummer Finances: Samaela Bilic-Eric, Elisabeth Mareschal Press and PR: Sandra Pfeifer, Christina Werner / w.hoch.2wei Graphic design: Christian Schienerl Our special thanks go to all the artists who have agreed to participate in this exhibition and have found interest in the exhibition’s conceptual framework, as well as contributed texts, statements, and interviews for the publication. We also very much appreciate the generous support from the authors and writers who have agreed to be published in a very different context as originally intended.

As every exhibition, Other than Yourself—An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space has been a team effort and not possible without numerous persons’ support, collaboration and advice in all the stages of its realization.

Thank you: Ori Bader, Sandrine Beeri, Andreas Gegner, Rachele Giudici, Alexia Holt at Tramway Glasgow, Karin Krank, Aline Maas, Francis McKee, Joep Münstermann, Tamara Rist, Karin Seinsoth at Hauser & Wirth Zürich/London, Käthe Walser, and our precious technical team.

140

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Photocredits © David Lamelas / LUX, Ill. pp. 10-12 © Hans Schabus / Bruno Klomfar / Engholm Engelhorn Galerie, Vienna Ill. pp.

16-18, 21 © Mario García Torres / Jan Mot, Brussels, Ill. pp. 22-24, 27 © Amos Gitai / Cinephil, Tel Aviv, Ill. pp. 2830, 32, 34-35 © Monika Sosnowska, Ill. pp. 38, 41 (right) © Allan Dimmick / The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Ill. pp.

36-37, 41 (left) © Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, Ill. pp. 43 (top), 45 © Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, L. Münz and G. Künstler, Adolf Loos, 1966, Ill. pp.

42, 46 (top) © M. Risselada, Raumplan versus Plan Libre, 1988, Ill. pp. 43 (bottom) © FLC/VBK, 2008, Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complète 1929–1934, Ill. pp. 49 (bottom) © FLC/ VBK, 2008, L’Architecture Vivante, 1929–1931, Ill. pp. 46 (middle+bottom) © FLC/VBK, 2008, L’Architecte, 1932, Ill. pp. 49 (top) © FLC/VBK, 2008, Le Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse, 1933, Ill. pp. 50 © Paul McCarthy / Hauser & Wirth, London / Zurich, Ill. p. 53 © Michael Strasser / T-B A21, Vienna, Ill. pp. 56-57, 58 © Boris Ondreicˇka, Ill. p. 61 © Michael Strasser / T-B A21, Vienna, Ill. pp. 6264, 66-67 © Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Ill. pp.

68-70 © Emanuel Danesch / David Rych, Ill. pp. 74-76, 78-79 © Sanja Ivekovic´, Ill. pp. 80-81 © T-B A21, Vienna, Ill. p. 82 © Sergio Prego / Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York / Galería Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, Ill. pp. 90-92, 95 © Aleksandra Signer, Ill. pp. 96-97, 99 © Dennis Hopper / Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Salzburg, Ill. p. 101 © Cindy Sherman, Metro Pictures, New York, Ill. pp. 102-103 © Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Ill. pp. 104-105 © Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milano, Ill. p. 106 © Jonathan Horowitz, Ill. p. 113 © Salla Tykkä / Yvon Lambert, Paris, Ill. pp. 114-116, 118-119 © Jens Ziehe / Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007, Ill. 120-121 © Amar Kanwar, Ill. pp. 124125 © Mikio Kurokawa / Yokohama Triennale, 2001, Ill. pp. 126-127 © Käthe Walser / Pipilotti Rist / Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Ill. p. 128 © Kenzie McKee / Tramway Gallery, London, Ill. p. 131 © Ján Mancˇus ˇka / Andy Keate / westlondonprojects, London, Ill. pp. 132-133, 135 © Zvone Pandza, Ill. p. 137

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary is committed to supporting the production of contemporary art and is actively engaged in commissioning and disseminating unconventional projects that defy traditional disciplinary categorizations. The foundation sustains a farreaching regional and international orientation and explores modes of presentation that are intended to provoke and broaden the way viewers perceive and experience art.

Founded in Vienna in 2002 by Francesca von Habsburg, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary represents the fourth generation of the Thyssen family’s dedication to the arts.

Exhibitions drawn from the foundation’s collection are regularly presented to the public.

Chairman Francesca von Habsburg Trustees Udo Kittelmann, MMK, Frankfurt Istvan Nagy, Bank Audi, Geneva Advisory Board Iara Boubnova, ICA, Sofia Olafur Eliasson, artist, Denmark/Iceland Samuel Keller, Fondation Beyerler, Basel Farshid Moussavi, FOA, London Peter Pakesch, Kunsthaus, Graz Simon de Pury, Philipps de Pury & Company, New York/Zurich Peter Weibel, ZKM, Karlsruhe Paul Windle, CEO, Windle Hair, London Curator Daniela Zyman, Vienna Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Himmelpfortgasse 13, 1010 Vienna, Austria T +43 1 513 98 56, F +43 513 98 56-22 office@tba21.org www.TBA21.org

This exhibition is generously supported by:

141

Other than Yourself— An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space

T-B A21 Chairman: Francesca von Habsburg Curatorial team: Daniela Zyman, Gabrielle Cram Exhibition architect: Philipp Krummel Collection Management: Barbara Horvath Publications: Eva Ebersberger Exhibition team: Alexandra Hennig, Evelyn Wysoudil, Beate Lex, Markus Schlüter, Mikael Horstmann, David Weidinger, Verena Platzgummer Finances: Samaela Bilic-Eric, Elisabeth Mareschal Press and PR: Sandra Pfeifer, Christina Werner / w.hoch.2wei Graphic design: Christian Schienerl Our special thanks go to all the artists who have agreed to participate in this exhibition and have found interest in the exhibition’s conceptual framework, as well as contributed texts, statements, and interviews for the publication. We also very much appreciate the generous support from the authors and writers who have agreed to be published in a very different context as originally intended.

As every exhibition, Other than Yourself—An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space has been a team effort and not possible without numerous persons’ support, collaboration and advice in all the stages of its realization.

Thank you: Ori Bader, Sandrine Beeri, Andreas Gegner, Rachele Giudici, Alexia Holt at Tramway Glasgow, Karin Krank, Aline Maas, Francis McKee, Joep Münstermann, Tamara Rist, Karin Seinsoth at Hauser & Wirth Zürich/London, Käthe Walser, and our precious technical team.

140

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Photocredits © David Lamelas / LUX, Ill. pp. 10-12 © Hans Schabus / Bruno Klomfar / Engholm Engelhorn Galerie, Vienna Ill. pp.

16-18, 21 © Mario García Torres / Jan Mot, Brussels, Ill. pp. 22-24, 27 © Amos Gitai / Cinephil, Tel Aviv, Ill. pp. 2830, 32, 34-35 © Monika Sosnowska, Ill. pp. 38, 41 (right) © Allan Dimmick / The Modern Institute, Glasgow, Ill. pp.

36-37, 41 (left) © Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, Ill. pp. 43 (top), 45 © Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, L. Münz and G. Künstler, Adolf Loos, 1966, Ill. pp.

42, 46 (top) © M. Risselada, Raumplan versus Plan Libre, 1988, Ill. pp. 43 (bottom) © FLC/VBK, 2008, Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complète 1929–1934, Ill. pp. 49 (bottom) © FLC/ VBK, 2008, L’Architecture Vivante, 1929–1931, Ill. pp. 46 (middle+bottom) © FLC/VBK, 2008, L’Architecte, 1932, Ill. pp. 49 (top) © FLC/VBK, 2008, Le Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse, 1933, Ill. pp. 50 © Paul McCarthy / Hauser & Wirth, London / Zurich, Ill. p. 53 © Michael Strasser / T-B A21, Vienna, Ill. pp. 56-57, 58 © Boris Ondreicˇka, Ill. p. 61 © Michael Strasser / T-B A21, Vienna, Ill. pp. 6264, 66-67 © Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Ill. pp.

68-70 © Emanuel Danesch / David Rych, Ill. pp. 74-76, 78-79 © Sanja Ivekovic´, Ill. pp. 80-81 © T-B A21, Vienna, Ill. p. 82 © Sergio Prego / Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York / Galería Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, Ill. pp. 90-92, 95 © Aleksandra Signer, Ill. pp. 96-97, 99 © Dennis Hopper / Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Salzburg, Ill. p. 101 © Cindy Sherman, Metro Pictures, New York, Ill. pp. 102-103 © Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Ill. pp. 104-105 © Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milano, Ill. p. 106 © Jonathan Horowitz, Ill. p. 113 © Salla Tykkä / Yvon Lambert, Paris, Ill. pp. 114-116, 118-119 © Jens Ziehe / Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007, Ill. 120-121 © Amar Kanwar, Ill. pp. 124125 © Mikio Kurokawa / Yokohama Triennale, 2001, Ill. pp. 126-127 © Käthe Walser / Pipilotti Rist / Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Ill. p. 128 © Kenzie McKee / Tramway Gallery, London, Ill. p. 131 © Ján Mancˇus ˇka / Andy Keate / westlondonprojects, London, Ill. pp. 132-133, 135 © Zvone Pandza, Ill. p. 137

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary is committed to supporting the production of contemporary art and is actively engaged in commissioning and disseminating unconventional projects that defy traditional disciplinary categorizations. The foundation sustains a farreaching regional and international orientation and explores modes of presentation that are intended to provoke and broaden the way viewers perceive and experience art.

Founded in Vienna in 2002 by Francesca von Habsburg, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary represents the fourth generation of the Thyssen family’s dedication to the arts.

Exhibitions drawn from the foundation’s collection are regularly presented to the public.

Chairman Francesca von Habsburg Trustees Udo Kittelmann, MMK, Frankfurt Istvan Nagy, Bank Audi, Geneva Advisory Board Iara Boubnova, ICA, Sofia Olafur Eliasson, artist, Denmark/Iceland Samuel Keller, Fondation Beyerler, Basel Farshid Moussavi, FOA, London Peter Pakesch, Kunsthaus, Graz Simon de Pury, Philipps de Pury & Company, New York/Zurich Peter Weibel, ZKM, Karlsruhe Paul Windle, CEO, Windle Hair, London Curator Daniela Zyman, Vienna Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Himmelpfortgasse 13, 1010 Vienna, Austria T +43 1 513 98 56, F +43 513 98 56-22 office@tba21.org www.TBA21.org

This exhibition is generously supported by:

141

Imprint

This catalog was published on the occasion of the exhibition Other than Yourself. An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space, February 8—September 21, 2008 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Himmelpfortgasse 13, 1010 Vienna, Austria Editor: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna Concept/edited by: Gabrielle Cram, Daniela Zyman/T-B A21 Graphic Design: SCHiENERL/ppfmd, Vienna Proofreading: Karen Jacobson, Allison Henze Printed by: REMAprint, Vienna All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form of media, neither technical nor electronic, including photocopies and digital storage, etc. All text copyrights lie with the authors.

2008 © the artists, the authors, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln Jenny Holzer: © VBK, Wien, 2008 Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln Ehrenstr. 4, 50672 Köln Tel. +49 (0) 221 / 20 59 6-53 Fax +49 (0) 221 / 20 59 6-60 Email: verlag@buchhandlung-walther-koenig.de Die Deutsche Bibliothek—CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Ein Titelsatz für diese Publikation ist bei Der Deutschen Bibliothek erhältlich Printed in Austria

144

Vertrieb / Distribution: Schweiz / Switzerland Buch 2000 c/o AVA Verlagsauslieferungen AG Centralweg 16 CH-8910 Affoltern a.A. Tel. +41 (0) 44 762 42 00 Fax +41 (0) 44 762 42 10 a.koll@ava.ch UK & Eire Cornerhouse Publications 70 Oxford Street GB-Manchester M1 5NH Tel. +44 (0) 161 200 15 03 Fax +44 (0) 161 200 15 04 publications@cornerhouse.org Außerhalb Europas / Outside Europe D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 155 6th Avenue, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10013 Tel: +1 212-627-1999 Fax: +1 212-627-9484 eleshowitz@dapinc.com

ISBN 978-3-86560-423-1

Imprint

This catalog was published on the occasion of the exhibition Other than Yourself. An Investigation between Inner and Outer Space, February 8—September 21, 2008 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Himmelpfortgasse 13, 1010 Vienna, Austria Editor: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna Concept/edited by: Gabrielle Cram, Daniela Zyman/T-B A21 Graphic Design: SCHiENERL/ppfmd, Vienna Proofreading: Karen Jacobson, Allison Henze Printed by: REMAprint, Vienna All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form of media, neither technical nor electronic, including photocopies and digital storage, etc. All text copyrights lie with the authors.

2008 © the artists, the authors, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln Jenny Holzer: © VBK, Wien, 2008 Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln Ehrenstr. 4, 50672 Köln Tel. +49 (0) 221 / 20 59 6-53 Fax +49 (0) 221 / 20 59 6-60 Email: verlag@buchhandlung-walther-koenig.de Die Deutsche Bibliothek—CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Ein Titelsatz für diese Publikation ist bei Der Deutschen Bibliothek erhältlich Printed in Austria

144

Vertrieb / Distribution: Schweiz / Switzerland Buch 2000 c/o AVA Verlagsauslieferungen AG Centralweg 16 CH-8910 Affoltern a.A. Tel. +41 (0) 44 762 42 00 Fax +41 (0) 44 762 42 10 a.koll@ava.ch UK & Eire Cornerhouse Publications 70 Oxford Street GB-Manchester M1 5NH Tel. +44 (0) 161 200 15 03 Fax +44 (0) 161 200 15 04 publications@cornerhouse.org Außerhalb Europas / Outside Europe D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 155 6th Avenue, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10013 Tel: +1 212-627-1999 Fax: +1 212-627-9484 eleshowitz@dapinc.com

ISBN 978-3-86560-423-1

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Janet Cardiff Maurizio Cattelan Emanuel Danesch/David Rych Mario García Torres Amos Gitai Jenny Holzer Dennis Hopper Jonathan Horowitz Sanja Ivekovic´ Amar Kanwar David Lamelas Ján Mancˇusˇka Paul McCarthy Boris Ondreicˇka Sergio Prego Pipilotti Rist Hans Schabus Cindy Sherman Roman Signer Monika Sosnowska Slaven Tolj Salla Tykkä

an investigation

between inner and

outer space

ISBN 978-3-86560-423-1

OTY_Umschlag_280108.indd 1

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary www.tba21.org

T-B A21

9 783865 604231

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln

30.01.2008 10:53:03 Uhr

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Janet Cardiff Maurizio Cattelan Emanuel Danesch/David Rych Mario García Torres Amos Gitai Jenny Holzer Dennis Hopper Jonathan Horowitz Sanja Ivekovic´ Amar Kanwar David Lamelas Ján Mancˇusˇka Paul McCarthy Boris Ondreicˇka Sergio Prego Pipilotti Rist Hans Schabus Cindy Sherman Roman Signer Monika Sosnowska Slaven Tolj Salla Tykkä

an investigation

between inner and

outer space

ISBN 978-3-86560-423-1

OTY_Umschlag_280108.indd 1

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary www.tba21.org

T-B A21

9 783865 604231

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln

30.01.2008 10:53:03 Uhr