Kai Bauer CHRISTIAN HASUCHA Interventions (from the opening speech at the Dortmund Art Association) ...If you, as a visitor to the exhibition opening, are unfamiliar with Christian Hasucha's approach and concept, you will find objects here that don't look like art, you will see photographs that don't depict what they show, and you are expected to understand complicated explanations of what are actually quite simple, clear actions through drawings, arrangements, and texts. Ideally, you should ask yourself two questions: 1.) Why am I even here? - and 2.) What does all this have to do with ME? I advise you to consider the first question carefully and perhaps answer it honestly at a later time. Regarding the second question, I would like to briefly explain various exhibition situations and then address the specific artistic concern here. In the first case, you come to an exhibition, and the artist tries to show you WHAT he has seen. This was the norm, especially before the invention of technical reproduction methods—the goal was to let the viewer see a landscape, a biblical scene, through the eyes of the artist or the patron. Today, it is primarily photography that is still understood as documentation and as a formulation of what has been seen. In the second case, artists try to show HOW they create something in an exhibition. The paint begins to flow, brushstrokes and movements become visible. Here, the subjective and affective impulse of the artist is set against the technical production of mass media—press and television. The artist sets his signs, his individual action, against the symbols of authority in advertising and traffic, which, as symbols of order and regulation, are meant to guide and seduce people. The third case is a major step toward abstraction and autonomy—here, artists show us seeing itself. The perception of the world becomes the subject of the artistic work. For some time now, exhibitions have been showing us how to create exhibitions, how to visit them and how to observe. Painters paint pictures that aren't pictures—or at least aren't meant to be; draftsmen and sculptors pretend to draw or sculpt. And the visitors and viewers play along—they pretend to be observing something, and they pretend to be visiting—as if they were looking for something, as if they had any business being there at all. When Niklas Luhmann's reflections on autopoietic and self-referential systems also infected the art world—which, in times of economic boom, was tensely gripped by a kind of hysterical navel-gazing—a fifth scenario unfolded. Some artists stopped exhibiting altogether—they went to the city... (previously, they went to the countryside or the desert). This is also true of Christian Hasucha. He has withdrawn from the exhibition circuit since the early 1980s. Especially in his case, the term 'artist' must be broadened and redefined—he is also, in a way, a sociologist, a behavioral scientist, and a media expert. and publicist. But he remains an artist because his artistic approach is subjective, irrational, spontaneous, and relies on chance, refusing to be confined by the seemingly objective methods of science. His art actions—which he calls "Public Interventions"—can perhaps also be described by what he no longer has: no opening reception, no invitation, no visitor quotas, no sales on the art market. The "Level Table" project, which we realized with him in Langenhagen last year, also demonstrated that his art never once made it into the arts section of newspapers, but was always covered under "Politics" or "Regional"—under "Miscellaneous." His actions can be divided into two areas. The first is a simple, everyday, or frequently occurring action as a sculptural work; the second is the ripple effect this action can generate in the public sphere (as well as the organizational preparations by the artist and organizers). This second step could be described—cautiously speaking—as work on social sculpture. For example: 'PATHS in Dortmund, Project No. 20', Part 1: A Dortmund resident gets up in the morning and, on his way to work, notices two places: a garden gate, a house number, a street corner, which he had never noticed before, but which he is now to mark on a small map in order to present a 20-step section of his daily route in a communicable form. He will later see his selected route, along with his name, published on posters around the city. The initiation, the selection process, the markings in the cityscape, and the publication on posters are the 'work' of the artist, who uses the city's structures and sign systems to artistically express his insights. The private act of daily walking is first brought to the individual's awareness, and second, marked by the signage, thus placing it in a new relationship to the functions of public urban life as part of private life. The result—what I would call a gigantic, city-sized sculpture—is an interference, a superimposition of artistic and administrative structures. Here in the exhibition, which the artist has arranged, thus returning to an art institution after a kind of artistic refresher course, a third step is added to the first two parts of a 'Public Intervention': its staging within an art context. The ‚Public Intervention P' – of which you see the platforms here – also begins with the mundane action of an ordinary citizen on their way to work: this passerby has had a small platform attached to a lamppost of their choosing. The timing of their ascent and the duration of their stay are entirely their own decision. A certain situational comedy in the execution already hints at the metaphor the platform becomes: it represents the aspiration for perspective and imagination. The passerby stands above it all – like Petrarch climbing Mont Ventoux to attain divine knowledge. They rise above the everyday. They hover above the ground, they take flight. They look down on the others, who remain firmly planted on the ground. By momentarily stepping out of the everyday flow of time and the daily routine, they have also elevated themselves to a higher plane, both spiritually and otherwise. And what makes him almost arrogant is the shift from the unambiguous (meaning: achieving a goal) to the infinitely multifaceted gaze of the dreamer. He looks into the distance and thus claims the right to something indeterminate, quite unlike the 'television' at home, which is limited by transmitters and devices to controllable norms. This conscious looking at others, this recognition of oneself in the other from a lofty perspective, is genuine communication as opposed to the pseudo-communication of so-called communication media, which are in reality indoctrination media. Hasucha's current return to the institution of the Kunstverein through the arrangement of his work in these spaces restores the exhibition's authenticity—with the help of photographic narrative, the viewer is enabled to see the world and the phenomena of his time through the eyes of another. The history of 'Intervention P' as a photo and object gallery led to a series of presumed 'portraits,' although objective documentation remains impossible. The individual, spontaneous experience of the passerby on the platform remains unfathomable and is celebrated as a banal mystery. This third step—the presentation as an exhibition, as an arrangement, as a staging, and as a quotation of exhibition forms—such as the 'ancestral gallery'—thus evokes the question of art beyond staging: 1) as a sculptural work with passersby standing on the platforms, and 2) as the appropriation of public structures in order to create this situation. Such concepts build on positions from the 1960s and 1970s. The American artist Lawrence Weiner wrote in 1969: '1. The artist can make the work. 2. The work can be made by another person. 3. The work does not have to be realized.' In Christian Hasucha's work, the artwork is also dependent on the person addressed, who decides whether the work should exist at all—without whose participation the work cannot exist. This is not an elitist, but a democratic art form. Cf. Project documentation No. 20: PATHS Cf. Project documentation No. 16: P