Reinhard Braun CHRISTIAN HASUCHA WEGE und ORTE Dortmund 1994 1. Christian Hasucha Public Intervention "PATHS", Project No. 20 "The games of steps are spatial designs. They weave the basic structure of places.". Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berlin 1988, p. 188 "…from the standpoint of wandering, cities have a psychogeographical soil profile with constant flows, fixed points, and eddies…" Guy-Ernest Debord, "Theory of Wandering" in: The Big Sleep and Its Customers, Hamburg 1990, p. 33 The public intervention "PATHS" by Christian Hasucha, realized at the invitation of the Dortmund Art Association, is another project within the framework of his strategy, pursued since 1981, between art and the public sphere. Leaving the field of sculpture and, with the introduction of the term "Intervention," deliberately distancing himself from the realm of installation, Hasucha has since been working in at least two directions: on the one hand, his work responds analytically to the structures of the art world and its contexts (museum, gallery, exhibition space, art object). On the other hand, it aims at a concept in the urban sphere that transcends the public aspect of art, pointing beyond the mechanisms and automatisms that art encounters when it leaves its spaces or those it has created around itself. What comes into focus here is primarily the (publicized) relationship between artwork and recipient, especially when both act outside their conventional roles, when neither the artwork nor the recipient can be readily categorized. Christian Hasucha thus operates at a boundary where well-defined concepts of the art context and art criticism are in flux, and interventions in the appearance, structural relationships, and mechanisms of everyday urban life trigger "constructive estrangement" (Christian Hasucha). This movement of the components of the everyday, this setting in motion of relationships, is of particular interest - components that, through deliberately staged situations and events of "Public Interventions," suddenly become perceptible and assessable differently. It is this movement, however, that also has a particular effect on the consequence is to illuminate their subject (urban everyday life) as if from the side, and to contour it anew and differently from that perspective. "The detail of an image that, seen 'from the front,' i.e., from a precisely frontal viewpoint, appears as a blurry blob, takes on clear and distinguishable forms when we view it from the side, 'obliquely.'" This means, in a sense, following a shift in perception, a shift that corresponds to the result and the focus of Christian Hasucha's projects. Through his public interventions, which are thus not to be understood or misunderstood as sculptural interventions in the narrow sense, he repeatedly creates such shifts in the appearance of (primarily urban) places - minimal shifts that occur at the margins, operating, as it were, from the periphery, and while they may disrupt the everyday nature of such a place, they do not completely negate it. The marginal interventions and additions just barely prevent the everyday and largely unconscious "use" of the space. which is created by the urban space or a particular place, without completely eliminating it. The projects implement a contradiction within and on the site, creating a (meaningful) space that is irritating and alienating, lying at an angle to the urban space - a contradiction that has the character of a boundary, a demarcation, at which usage, so to speak, intensifies and can be "represented": something becomes visible that was previously not perceived (or could not be perceived). Through their staging, the interventions generate their own (epi)center of meaning change, which, however, always remains tied to the situation and is only comprehensible against the backdrop of its superimposition on the space in which the staging operates. Irritation is always the irritation of something it is directed at or against - and Christian Hasucha ultimately aims to still, to interrupt, something of the unconscious of the city, of its constantly unfolding and repeating patterns of movement and action in a specific location, so that something other than superimposition can take hold there, a different kind of action, movement, and ultimately a different way of thinking about (urban) space and the complex role of the individual within it. These interventions in the structure of places thus appear less as forms of art and more as targeted "urban practices" - a methodology that aims to create situations that enable the possibilities of liberated and free, i.e., personal, interaction with the urban. The artistic strategy forms the necessary conceptual and organizational interface for this. "Only when the action and execution are subtle and ambivalent can it be convincing as an artistic model" (Christian Hasucha). The public intervention "Paths" is primarily aimed at a form of everyday life for the residents of Dortmund. Christian Hasucha distributes initial letters describing the project and inviting participation: up to one hundred people can choose a section of a route they take - perhaps on their daily commute to work, school, or shopping - at any location, fill in the location of this approximately 20-step section on the reply letter, and return it. Based on this information, Hasucha then marks the section of the path at its endpoints (so it is not a continuous line) and assigns it a sequential number. This number, the location of the route, and the name of the person who selected it are then published on posters throughout the city. The posters serve as the sole means of documentation for the public, allowing them to reconstruct the work. Specific routes can be sought out and even associated with particular individuals. Beyond a catalog, there are no public statements regarding this project. Even the initial letter only mentions that the public interventions address "in an exemplary way the relationship between everyday life and artistic intervention" and create "a poetic counterpart to the usual street markings," which, however, will fade and disappear into invisibility after a few weeks. It is therefore a time-limited project, the duration of which cannot be predicted and will vary considerably depending on the markings. However, it does not represent a permanent intervention in the city's "surfaces," which will thus remain primarily reserved for traffic and goods, i.e., consumption. If these markings in the urban space form the starting point, they initiate a potential form of communication not through the markings themselves, but through behavior within the city. They indicate a use that, in a certain sense, describes inhabiting and living in the city. These routes, their random distribution across the urban space, document the constant movements of pedestrians, "whose bodies follow the more or less distinct script of an urban 'text' that they write without being able to read it." Their meaning, therefore, apparently lies not in their form, nor in their specific arrangements and distribution, but in what these arrangements and distribution convey about the "inscription" of the city by individuals. It thus becomes clear once again that public interventions consistently operate on the level of what they set in motion, what they describe and indicate, and not through the objects and/or signs they create and insert into the urban space. The intervention "PATHS" thus dynamizes the relationship between the individual and urban space. The project empowers participants to intervene in the urban environment, leaving fleeting inscriptions and marks within it. Ultimately, the project merely serves as the medium for these inscriptions. Participants can manifest the text they write as they move through the city at a specific location, creating a trace that simultaneously incorporates something of the urban script by which individuals have always oriented themselves on their journeys through the city. This personal "text" - or rather, a subtext, superimposed as a personal "script" onto the text or texture of the city - can now become the subject of a communication that revolves precisely around movement, understanding this movement as a form of permanent yet fleeting occupation and appropriation of the city. The everyday is lifted from invisibility and incommunicability and becomes a potential object of reflection (not, or rather not primarily, in relation to the project as an artistic event, but rather by the inhabitants themselves, by reacting to the markers in different ways). Thus, the preferences for choosing a particular route, the urban attractions or deserts that guide the way, are called into question; that is, the urban structures themselves, as the ordering system of everyday life, come into focus through the mode of their "use," which suddenly becomes visible. In this respect, the waymarkers already document a form of interaction with the city that normally remains hidden behind the everyday nature of this interaction. There is an alienation, an inaccessibility, inherent in the everyday, which consists in the fact that it has no "surface" on which it can be made manifest, on which the countless practices and actions of everyday life would be recorded. (What is called popular culture is merely a formalization and ritualization of a part of this invisibility of everyday life.) In this sense of invisibility, the everyday appears as an action that constitutes a boundary, a permanent demarcation against a backdrop of invisibility: the inhabitant as a pedestrian constantly draws their line between presence and disappearance; this demarcation is that incessant subtext of the urban (and also of history). And this demarcation knows only the present. "Walking can thus, for the time being, be defined as follows: it is the space of expression." An expression, however, that articulates itself in a void, and this void, this space without significant cultural labeling, is everyday life. We all move through the city in a similar way. The visibility that suddenly arises through the project from seemingly automated situations and processes suddenly places them in a completely different context with what remains as everyday life. By defining urban movement on foot as such a space of expression, Christian Hasucha, in effect, gives it a text. The marking of routes thus creates a form of signature and always refers to that which is absent, something that has already happened without being documented: a specific route through the city has been taken. The markings themselves, however, should not be read as a superficial structuring or visualization of this action: firstly, because they are subject to a certain arbitrariness (regarding the mode of selection, or rather, the offerings, that ultimately lead to those markings and their distribution in urban space), and secondly, because they merely tell of an act they are tracing, without representing or interpreting it. The markings function more like a sign, like a concept that can only refer to something, point to something that is happening or has happened elsewhere. Ultimately, the focus is on the practice itself (movement in and through the city), which is only fragmentarily transformed into a form of legibility, or rather, reconstructibility. By speaking of a boundary, the movement through the city, walking - whether purposeful or a meandering stroll - can also be characterized as a practice that simultaneously originates in a place and produces a space: walking continually generates such a space along the path it takes and expands - views, detours, meeting points, conversations, observations. The waymarkers that Christian Hasucha establishes are also symbolizations of these spaces, these spaces and places produced by countless habits, turns, decisions, lures (of the commodity), and chance occurrences, which disappear again at the point where they are constructed, i.e., experienced. For a brief stretch, the markers highlight that boundary line along which a subject designs their personal spaces of and within the urban. Christian Hasucha is on the trail of the spaces that are thus projected into the city. They point to the city as an object that is acted upon, that is used. In this sense, the markings of the sections traversed by different people according to diverse criteria can only be read as written characters that make the inscription of the city by these individuals visible: the totality of the markings results in a specific (collective) reading of the city. The interaction with the place, the development of spaces, literally becomes a system of signs that covers the city - and which itself disappears again, becoming like the invisibility of these uninterrupted practices. The everyday is lifted from invisibility and incommunicability and becomes the subject of a reflection and form of expression by the individual in everyday life, which they themselves hardly perceive as such. Here, two concepts of space also collide: the structured, stable space of the city, which arises from an order and constantly produces order, and the structuring, fluctuating, fleeting, and unstable space of the individual, which only appears as a practice that constantly produces a space, while the urban, so to speak, precedes this practice as a condition, but is only actualized through it. Through and with the markings of the public intervention "PATHS," a complex relationship between city and inhabitant is revealed. In an urban present where the mobility of images, signs, (commodity) symbols, etc., has increasingly replaced or annexed physical mobility, such a project re-produces a form of presence for this metabolic component of the urban - that is, a form of presence for the subject in relation to the ubiquitous sign systems of the city. This form of presence is what the appropriation enabled by the project ultimately aims for. In an urban present where the mobility of images, signs, and (commodity) symbols has increasingly replaced or annexed physical mobility, such a project produces a form of presence for this metabolic component of the urban—that is, a form of presence for the subject in relation to the ubiquitous sign systems of the city. 2. Christian Hasuoha - Public Intervention "P", Project No. 16 "The spatial arrangement enables a 'panoptic practice' starting from a 'personal' location, from which the gaze transforms external forces into objects that can be observed, measured, controlled, and thus 'incorporated' into one's own perspective." Parallel to the "Public Intervention 'PATHS'," an arrangement can be seen in the Kunstverein's spaces that is based on a work that has so far been realized in Cologne (1993), Heilbronn, and Graz (1994). The "Public Intervention 'P'" (executed in Graz as part of the exhibition "Translocation - The Displaced Place. Art Between Architecture") focuses on the aspect of a possible (limited) appropriation of urban spaces by the project participants. Similarly, in response to an initial letter, individuals could choose locations where they would construct a platform at a certain height. They may have been erected 15 cm above the ground. These platforms were installed by Christian Hasucha and remained there for a certain period of time, freely available to the public. The presentation of the project at the Kunstverein Dortmund consists of 50 photographic canvases showing views from the respective platforms, references to the temporary owners, and the platforms themselves, which still bear traces of their use. This constellation, too, demonstrates once again that Christian Hasucha is interested in what happens from the platforms, rather than in showing their locations and thus documenting the platforms themselves. The platforms, installed in the urban space according to the participants' wishes, initially represent points to which people can go and from which they can act in any way they choose. Underlying this work is therefore the fundamental act of differentiating and dividing space, which is what creates places and enables the interplay of spaces. Only the marking creates a concrete place, generates a break within a space, and makes the place addressable and nameable. The platform is once again that place capable of standing apart from the conventional functions of public spaces and from the instructions for action associated with such functions. A specific form of autonomy is established and finds its expression in the use of the platform. The platform thus creates the aforementioned places from which the subject is able to exercise a particular, self-determined mode of seeing or acting. The platforms become a vehicle for constructing the subject's own place, from which and at which the subject can intervene in the context of the place through its specific use; that is, from this one place, the subject can temporarily - and arbitrarily - define its relationship to the surrounding space: observing, declaiming, pausing, posing, etc. The platform represents a pedestal for all those actions that would otherwise be performed in this or other places. Through the platform, however, the arbitrary place becomes a special one because it suddenly becomes nameable as the concrete location of the action: "we meet at my platform," "I observe/speak from my platform." The platform provides a pedestal for all those actions that would otherwise be performed in this or other places. The distribution of the platforms in the urban space—analogous to the distribution of waymarkers in Dortmund—in itself represents a specific form of differentiation of urban spaces, reflecting an interest in particular situations and constellations, and specifically targeting other places, buildings, and objects. What the project activates even before it enables its specific form of activity in the urban space is a probing, a "reading" of the city with regard to a location that could be transformed into a (personal) place by the platform. In this sense, the platform is already a reaction to a space, a place that will become the stage for possible actions. The term "intervention" thus refers not only to the triggering gesture, i.e., The focus is not so much on the objects themselves produced by Christian Hasucha, but rather on the practices of the participants, on the use or non-use they make of this marked and distinguished, because elevated, place - and on the considerations that lead to the selection, which is already a consequence of other actions, of another use: a commentary on urban space, its analysis of which spot might be suitable for an (my) exposure. The exposure alone - a consequence of a 15-centimeter difference in height - already presupposes something else in any case, against which the exposure can be realized, into which the exposure and the action are directed. This other - virtually the vanishing point of the strategies that Christian Hasucha employs - is public space, the structures, schemes, and standardizations that constitute it. For Christian Hasucha, public space is therefore not merely an architectural or urban planning phenomenon, but a network of diverse practices and habits, automatisms - in any case, a web of events and actions performed deliberately or almost unconsciously - a psychogeographical system. Hasucha explores this public space, but above all, the multifaceted relationship of the individual to it and the parameters that determine this relationship. He repeatedly aims to alter the "equations according to which feedback loops are interconnected in urban structures; thus, metaphorically speaking, he shifts positions within a coordinate system of perception and movement, along with the underlying needs and necessities." The platform is thus a place that enables and triggers practices through which users expose themselves to the fabric of public space, while simultaneously staging a temporary appropriation of that space. The individual no longer experiences themselves solely as someone defined or conditioned by the place, but rather as the moment capable of temporarily redefining the place - from its periphery, as it were, from an off-screen perspective. In the middle of a busy intersection, for example, it could represent a vantage point from which the activity can be calmly observed, allowing the individual to briefly withdraw from it. What the platform initiates is an appropriation that transforms the place, introducing a new scope for its use. This scope opens up a new connection between the concrete (personal) place and public space, a connection realized through the action of the subject, who thereby briefly places themselves at the center. The intervention becomes a gesture that attracts attention. The platform appears as an implanted interface, at which an interaction can be both initiated and redefined, for which Christian Hasucha stages a model situation: "Under suitable circumstances, some examples of subjective communication can be realized within the parameters surrounding and determining us" (Christian Hasucha). However, the presentation at the Kunstverein demonstrates that such a strategy cannot be realized in conventional exhibition spaces. It reveals their inherent alienation from the forms of public discourse that interest Christian Hasucha: the appearance, the structural relationships, and the mechanisms of everyday life. For this reason, although the exhibition focuses on those interventions in Cologne, Heilbronn, and Graz, it also centrally reflects on the exhibition context that transforms a process into a relic, a "vehicle" into an art object, and a form of dispersion and transience into an installation. There are no fleeting or accidental things here; even when they disappear, they leave traces that take their place and generate eminent meaning—meanings that repeatedly converge on concepts and ideas of art. Art, while having appropriated everything in principle, never reaches the point of negating itself as art in this appropriation, without then re-establishing this negation as art. As such an "autopoietic system" (Niklas Luhmann) with a high degree of self-reference and self-reflexivity, the art context positions itself in direct opposition to everyday life. The exhibition space, the gallery, the museum are, so to speak, voids within the everyday, initiating a specific, concentrated engagement with objects and events and, through a radical appropriation, transforming every phenomenon into art. In this artificial relationship between recipient and object of attention, there is no room for those "unconscious practices of everyday use"; every detail suggests meaning and formal intention that demands to be deciphered and interpreted. The exhibition is not a place of diffuse overlapping of diverse subjective actions and events, but rather one of significant artifacts and controlled processes. Every "shock," every irritation, is absorbed by this premise. In this respect, it precisely prevents the moment of "constructive estrangement" that Christian Hasucha aims for. Because the intervention thus targets entirely different contexts, it cannot be documented here. What emerges, however, is a new form of connection between all components of the project, not a reconstruction: the platform is no longer an object of use, but an object-sign; the moment of action is substituted by another sign form (photography); and the process of selection, of personalizing the platform, is represented by the name of the temporary owner. This constellation results in an abstract schema of references; their arrangement and distribution in space generate an aesthetic dimension that further distinguishes the arrangement from an intervention. The presentation in the rooms of the Dortmund Art Association must therefore be read as an independent work, as a system of references, not as a re-presentation or even as documentation, because otherwise one misunderstands the fundamental aspects of Christian Hasucha's work. © Reinhard Braun 1994 Reinhard Braun, art historian, works for Camera Austria and as a freelance writer; lives in Graz. Cf. Project documentation No. 20: PATHS