Peter Funken

Text from "Art Reviews"
"Günter's Window"
www.art-on.de, Berlin 2001

Interview with Christian Hasucha


Peter Funken:
In mid-September 2000, you "transplanted" your neighbor, the 50-year-old early retiree Günter Schulz, along with his 12-square-meter window niche and its furnishings - furniture, pictures, tablecloth, etc. - from his home in Berlin-Neukölln to Mülheim an der Ruhr. Günter Schulz spent 14 days in a kind of raised room on stilts on a busy street in Mülheim, essentially doing what he does in Berlin: looking out of the window. You called the project "Günter's Window." What was your intention with it?

Christian Hasucha:
As with all my interventions, "Günter's Window" is also about the principle of focus. Something that appears in an exemplary altered constellation relative to its surroundings raises questions about its belonging and location. The exemplary element in this case was the window situation of my neighbor Günter Schulz, who has lived alone in his one-room apartment since 1994 and often looks out of the window. I recruited him as a participant - not as an exhibit, as the yellow press reported. Günter Schulz was free to do as he pleased in Mülheim; he stayed in a hotel. From the outside, his window niche was positioned like a model facade on a busy street, raised on stilts to achieve the same height and geographical orientation as in Berlin. Actually, not an unusual sight; only the knowledge that someone had allowed themselves to be relocated to the Ruhr area, parallel to their place of origin in Berlin, made it unusual. The citizens of Mülheim learned this through the media. Günter Schulz was free to do as he pleased in Mülheim, staying in a hotel.

P. F.:
Your intervention caused quite a stir. The media - especially private TV stations - pounced on Günter Schulz. You then shielded Günter Schulz from the press. Wasn't the media interest foreseeable?

C. H.:
This project has very clearly demonstrated that the yellow press and private TV stations aren't really interested in the unusual, let alone willing to adequately convey the unusual and its peculiarities. Everything that appears on the public stage is forced into a familiar mold; there's no room for the unfamiliar. I suspect they don't want to subject their target audience to anything difficult to digest, and certainly don't want to give the impression that there's something that can't be immediately categorized. So, whenever a newspaper coined a catchy but incorrect term, it was readily copied, thus amplifying misunderstandings.

P. F.:
Your interventions often involve a transfer of ideas, places, and objects. "Günter's Window" strikes me as a kind of reversal of the "Big Brother" concept: Instead of us, the public, being the voyeurs watching and gleefully observing a group of people confined to our home, this time it's a single individual - and one who, as an early retiree, belongs to society's disadvantaged - who casts his gaze upon public life from within his own space...

C. H.:
Yes, exactly. The passersby in Mülheim were the ones being observed. That's probably why there was so much protest against this project. For Günter Schulz, the situation was the same, yet different: He was in his room during the day, but his refrigerator was in the supermarket next door, his toilet was a portable toilet on the street, and his bed was in a hotel. His living situation had thus diversified somewhat, but his familiar view outside was completely different from his Berlin perspective. I often visited Günter Schulz in his window niche in Mülheim. When we sat together in front of the television, it was truly cozy.

P. F.:
What insights did you gain after the intervention in Mülheim? For example, did you realize that there's practically nothing left today that can withstand the voyeurism of the media? It seems as if values like self-knowledge and the opportunity for individual development, which were at least previously associated with art, have given way to a ubiquitous and media-driven need for events, pseudo-publicity, and voyeurism. What possibilities does an interventionist art form like yours offer, which, in its approach, certainly differs from media spectacle?

C. H.:
As mentioned at the beginning, Mr. Schulz moved to Mülheim as an example, or representative, of other potential participants. Many people I told about it imagined themselves in a similar situation, asking themselves precisely the same questions about conditions, environment, and location that I myself grapple with. Because the interventionist installation in Mülheim was relatively large and had already received considerable media attention and discussion beforehand, it soon became a place of pilgrimage for Mülheim residents. I don't want to recount the unspeakable debates with the RTL team, who couldn't grasp that someone would install something unsuitable for television and still insist on being spared TV coverage. Many institutional exhibition organizers, more or less enthusiastically, surrender themselves to the media because this could increase the response, the visitor numbers, on which everything depends these days. However, they fail to consider that the media frenzy serves a similar function to a museum's aura: that of embellishment! With the artistic thinking we developed in the 1980s, it was a need and a necessity for me and many of my colleagues to distance ourselves from the distortions of the art world and its hallowed art venues. The widespread discussion surrounding large-scale installations like Hans Haake's "Population Box" in the Reichstag demonstrates that the subtlety of intervention, as we had already achieved, is being lost sight of. Here, the focus is on the success or failure of participatory projects, on the content of language, and on political understanding. Aesthetic principles and debates can only atrophy in such a broad discussion because public, contemporary art is instrumentalized from many sides, thus obstructing individual access. In Mülheim, this obfuscation caught up with me again. Perhaps I need to become more discreet in my work.

P. F.:
Can you explain the concept of intervention that you developed in more detail? How can one define the relationship between aesthetics and society, and vice versa, within this concept?

C. H.:
I've been using the term "intervention" since 1981, when I was working with the appearances of puddles in London's Docklands. The problem I faced back then was that anything you publicly articulated as an artist could also be labeled "art." This label then created something like a virtual "white cube" that prevented contextual experience. Everyone who knew it was an art action drew on their preconceived notions of art to form an opinion. The prevailing, bourgeois understanding of art, however, was dominated by the idea that art occurs in social spaces of freedom and emptiness, and therefore must, by its very nature, be conceptually transferred into some overarching cultural context. This, of course, prevented a direct look at what's immediately apparent, at the constellation of things and their environments in relation to one another. My solution at the time was not to declare my public activities as art in the first place, a practice I often still follow today. At that time, I coined the term "Public Interventions," which I used to label a series of projects in which I developed several intervention principles. For some projects, such as "Günter's Window," anonymity wasn't possible because they were part of a larger context, in this case, the "Mülheim Media Mile." In these cases, I spoke extensively with the organizers beforehand to clarify the potential conditions of publication. Basically, there are three perspectives of reception for these interventions: a) that of the staff and "informed" participants, b) that of residents, passersby, and anyone else directly affected, and c) that of the recipients of information. Strangely enough, many recipients of information believe that an intervention is created primarily for them as art tourists. When they then arrive, they often find a lack of clear public indications of the intervention site. This reveals a view of intervention art akin to that of terrariums: the view from the outside of a hermetically sealed enclosure. I have addressed this perspective from time to time and allowed art tourists to present themselves. But there is also another approach: that of intervention. This applies, of course, to the creators of interventions, but also to interested visitors. What is needed here is not the detached, fleeting gaze of the opening-night crowd, but rather the inquisitive gaze of the wanderer, who turns to the things, processes, structures, and people living within them that are found on site.

I plan interventions not only for specific situations, but also to create specific situations; not only situation-related, but also generating situations, sometimes involving more, often just a few people. These interventions can develop into genuine disruptions, which are often adapted to relatively quickly. Not only for this reason, but also because urban conditions are changing rapidly today, I continue to plan my projects as temporary interventions. It's difficult to say how many residents and passersby accept these interventionist disruptions as an opportunity for reflection. Often it also depends on whether the local press is involved, which is sometimes necessary. A constellation whose dimension would otherwise remain unrecognizable can, for example, be communicated in this way. From my own experience, I know that this is a rather risky approach because, if the intervention generates buzz, copycats immediately appear, eager to exploit the media frenzy for their own gain. On the other hand, I've also found that it can spark interest, interest that can be used for discussions about the general and specific concepts of art. Then, for example, the concept of "aesthetics" can also be seen as it can be derived etymologically: from Greek "aisthetike" from "aisthanestai", which means "to perceive".

Cf. Project documentation No. 35: Günter's window