JENS HAANING : ILLEGAL WORKER (p. 102-105)
Nicolas Bourriaud
Style once used to be enough to define the identity of an artist. But in the
contemporary world, identity is never much more than an access code, a logo (at
best) or a sales pitch (at worst). Surveying a formal territory understood as a
private property thus isn't the issue anymore. The work of many artists today is
carried out in a succession of aesthetic "moves" apparently isolated from one another.
These operators produce exhibitions which are often very disparate formally, since
they only consider forms as a tool, rather than an end for their work. Among them,
one could name
Maurizio Cattelan or
Gianni Motti, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen,
Kendell Geers,
Matthieu Laurette,
Christian Jankowsky,
Wim Delvoye and finally,
Jens Haaning. Neither can their practice be described as "experimental" (i.e. this is
not what makes it particular) since it is not rooted in the image of a studiocum-
laboratory. Rather than investigating a given issue (through a vertical, drilling
process), this type of practice unfolds on a horizontal line where recurring elements
end up defining a personal universe, in other words a specific toolbox designed to process
a similarly specific mass of information.
With respect to this re-centering of aesthetics towards a mode where forms are
instrumental, how can the quality of the works thus produced be measured? It is of
course understood that the issue isn't only whether a work functions or not; a lot of
art that "functions well" turns out to be disastrous, or simply boring. The concept
of "accuracy" seems more convincing. What, for want of a better word, one often
calls the "beauty" of an artwork is only in most cases the translation in everyday
language of a feeling of accuracy which strikes us: the adequate form to convey a
singular vision of the world, a precise handling of one's tools. Relevance in the current
aesthetics debate, relevance in the period in which it arises. And potentially
sustainable as well, if the various elements which "hold" it together persist in their
association, which is not always the case, as the perusal of any catalogue from the
‘80s would easily demonstrate.
Jens Haaning's artworks function, in real time moreover. They demand our
participation, not from a theoretical point of view (as the notion of "participation"
implied in 50s happenings), but in order to verify the concrete hypothesis they materialize. The travel agency he set up at the Chouakri gallery in Berlin delivered real plane tickets; in his supermarket of imported goods in Fribourg, the public
could really compare the prices and purchase the products (Super Discount, 1998).
Far from an esthetic of the reconstitution (as with
Guillaume Bijl, who transformed
exhibition spaces into trompe-l'oeil figures), Haaning constructs structures whose
functioning is the very object of his practice, beyond any consideration of the nature
of art or the museum. This attitude towards the art system is actually typical of the
art of today: while the exhibition space was a medium in itself for conceptual artists,
an exemplary space from which one could start questioning society as a whole,
today it has become a space like any other, an almost neutral space, since all social
spaces have been homogenized by the neo-liberal economy. Why work specifically
on the museum or the gallery since they are only elements in a chain of interdependent
spaces? The issue is less to analyze or criticize this space than to define
its site within wider systems of production, whose relations have to be established
and codified by the artist himself. In short, it is the socius (the complex of channels
distributing information, goods and human relations) which has become the real
space of the exhibition for the artists of this generation. The art center or the
gallery are particular cases which nonetheless belong to the totalizing whole one
could describe as the "public place". This is for example the case with
Untitled (de
Appel — de Gelderse Roos), 2000, a work where Haaning installed a live transmission
from an art center to a psychiatric hospital. This was no exploitative model of
exchange, since the connection worked only one way, turning the exhibition space
into a human zoo. Where one would have expected a commentary on the art
institution, Haaning made us reflect on that of psychiatry.
Society, seen through the work of Jens Haaning, is a body divided into lobbies,
quotas or communities. But it principally appears as a vast catalogue of narrative
frameworks governed by the audiovisual model of editing. His work asks a question:
is this edit in which we live the only one possible? From the same material (the
everyday), it is always possible to produce different versions of reality. His work
thus functions like an editing suite, reorganizing social forms by producing
alternative scenarios. Haaning de-programs and re-programs, he suggests that
other uses of collective space are possible. His pieces hint at these uses while
materializing them.
One of his favorite models is the immigrant community. In any society, for an
important part of the "national" population, immigration is seen as a kind of foreign
body. This image is further reinforced in the collective imagination by the fact that
immigrants are generally denied any positive representation, any space of inscription.
Off-screen in relation to the social imagination, it is a "margin" without images which we generally only perceive through politically coded representations. In
various works, Haaning has attempted to materialize these semi-invisible
communities: for example,
Turkish Jokes (1994) or
Arabic Jokes (1996), where he
injected a foreign language into the city's body, letting it bring together those who
could speak it, thus for once excluding the "natives", leaving them without any ability
to read the message. Turkish Jokes functions like those chemicals which, once
inoculated into the patient's body, temporarily make the network of his veins visible
under X-rays. To make visible: stickers on their cars reveal the nationality of taxi
drivers (
The Employees of Taxa + 4 x 35, 2000). Enabling all foreigners to go to the
city pool for free is an inversion of regular privileges but also lets an image of their
presence arise (
Foreigners Free – Biel Swimming Pool, 2000). Haaning has repeated
this gesture on various occasions, giving totally free access to immigrants in the
museums and art centers where he has been invited, thus electing a "people" as
the ideal spectator of his works: the alien victim of racism and misunderstanding,
the economic nomad produced by ultra-liberalism and third-world poverty. More
generally, Jens Haaning's work points out the way in which any artwork generates a
certain type of behavior, but also a micro-community of viewers. Thus, for the Western
spectator Ma'lesh (2000) will look like an elegant light-box in black and white, while
those who read Arabic will also find a strange sign of complicity: "Who cares?"
Haaning's work enters the theoretical framework of relational aesthetics, since it
first evolves in the inter-human field, producing social relations and negotiations
before any other aesthetic considerations. But what is important is that Haaning
never considers the universe of human relations as an innocent space. Far from
some of the well-wishing social and cultural caricatures which are all too often
associated with "relational" practices, Haaning takes the contradictions and the
violence of social space into account. Sometimes he even stages them in unbearable
situations, forming a team of workers to produce real weapons (
Weapon
Production, 1995), or, in a more subtle fashion, proposing to turn a bankrupt
factory located next to the site of a concentration camp into a holiday resort
(
Das Faserstoff Project, 1998). Nazism, Taylorism, leisure industry: a similar root?
Not every community is good.
Exchange, or rather substitution, is one of the principal figures of this practice
founded on establishing forced connections: thus a neon tube from a Danish
exhibition space ended up hanging on the ceiling of the Luther King food store in
Houston, Texas (
Copenhagen–Texas (Light Bulb Exchange), 1999). Or this chair
from gallery Wallner which was exchanged with another from the Klub Diplomat,
a space for foreigners in Copenhagen. The everyday objects thus displaced function like inverted readymades: the mass-produced object does not change
status, but materializes a pairing; it links two places together and creates a
space which is the very form of the work. This very particular form (a space
in-between two places, a movement between two situations) also plays a very
important role in many contemporary artworks: Rirkrit Tiravanija recreated the
dimensions of his New York apartment at the Kunstverein in Cologne, Maurizio
Cattelan exhibited the loot of a burglary committed a few meters away from the De
Appel Foundation, Pierre Huyghe worked on the distance separating a lived experience
from a Hollywood fiction… The art of today follows the tracks of a border
zone, and Haaning is one of its most stubborn explorers.
Matthieu Laurette, proposing
to become a citizen of a tax haven, formulates a similar problem like in
Haaning's piece,
Danish Passport (1997). Composed of his passport placed under
glass: both are premised on the idea that we live in a commodified space, where
nationality is only one type of property amongst others and thus also has a price.
This tendency to insert humanity within abstract structures is certainly the central
figure of Jens Haaning's activities. The space of exchange does of course constitute
their place and form, but most of the time, what is at stake is an openly displayed
substitution that in turn exposes normative codes (ethnic, social, aesthetics). Hence
his
Refugee Calendar is a calendar like any other which simply replaces the
customary images of desire with those we refuse to face, pictures of the alien living
a few blocks away from us, "in irregular situation", as one calls the illegal workers
and immigrants, the families or individuals herded in refugee camps. The artist
claims a similarly "irregular situation" for himself within the field of contemporary
art–working in the cellars of aesthetics.
Translated from French by Mai-Thu Perret, Geneva.
