Deceptions, Disturbances, Interfaces and Enablers Christian Hasucha Deceptions I Now, a worker somewhere in Berlin with a fluorescent vest and a trolley full of materials begins to set up a building site by placing warning signs. He chooses the position carefully, drills a narrow cylindrical hole with an auger and places a traffic bollard in it. He takes a trough, fills it with water from a canister that he’s brought with him, and opens a sack of pre-mixed cement. Using a spade he folds it all together into a damp mixture and fills the hole around the post to just under ground level. The post is straightened with a spirit level and the hole filled up with some sand. Then the worker collects the remaining materials together, puts them all in his trolley and leaves the site. An apparently functional traffic bollard remains. The bollard will hardly attract the attention of the city’s inhabitants. However, being indistinguishable from all other official bollards it can create uncertainty. The precondition for this uncertainty is the knowledge that an artist carried out this action in the spring of 2009 in different sites in Berlin with 16 bollards. The artist gradually disseminates information about his action. A list of the ‘implantation’ sites is not available. The question is: which is an official and which an artistically placed object? The decision about which post in the city is installed according to purely aesthetic and spatial criteria is left to the recipient of this information. However, is something artistic generated in some places? Who then is the author? II Now, the artist begins to build the supporting structure for a complete reconstruction of a space in Moabit that has been used as an exhibition venue for the last two years. Residents and passers-by, from whom the building work cannot be concealed, enquire as to what kind of shop is going to be here. A couple of days later even the large shop window is taken out so that the Moabit outside space can enter the building. A casing for concrete steps is placed in front of the façade. In the meantime, the interior walls are completely covered with plasterboards. After the concrete steps have set an opening takes place beside them, people sit on the steps and drink beer. Going up the steps, the public extension of the space is open day and night and is actively used, as the traces on the walls, anecdotes from the neighbours and the appearance of the fire brigade coming to the aid of a destitute person they found there attest. Disturbances For whom do I carry out such interventions?* There was a time when I was very concerned with this question, and travelled for a year with tools and a converted delivery van from the fringes of Europe to Asia Minor, and left behind me my interventions to be discovered by chance in the places that inspired me. I wanted to know if it would be enough for me to work anonymously and without direct feedback. The answer was: no, it wasn’t. On the other hand, it became clear to me that I increasingly moved away from a type of presentation that was intended to be conserved if possible. After my return, I realised that for many of my colleagues and people interested in art the documentation, sketches and stories of my travel-works sufficed to make them present. In a certain way they were rated as even more consistent than what I had realised within the exhibition ritual of a Kunstverein or gallery. It became clear to me that in interventions in daily structures the punctual private view visitor could himself be the disturbing factor if he did not conceptually belong to the ‘image’. I had no public for the intervention with bollards except my own accompanying witness. In the back part of the building alongside the gutting of the Moabit exhibition space a second opening took place, so that the confusion factor for casual passers-by was maintained. Are ‘openings’ for interventionist art now counterconstructive? Absolutely, if the art public spreads itself through the actual target audience (neighbours, passers-by, etc.). Not, if the intervention itself remains undisturbed by this ritual or the perception of the intervention takes place within the normal daily structure, which can happen when the relevant information is gradually distributed thus avoiding a mass of art visitors and enabling a ‘quiet’ witnessing of the action. Should I be requested to make a more traditional exhibition in which I increasingly show the artistic documentation and relicts of my interventions, I would be regularly meeting members of the public at the opening who declare themselves to be long-standing ‘silent’ participants in my public works and impulses. Interfaces Looking back, I can say that many of my interventions, whose modes of execution and design variations I carried out single-handedly, pointed out many perspectives and possibilities for new public projects.** Certainly there were difficulties in being accepted by the authorities and I often avoided official contact. The elaborate permission process for small works seemed unnecessary to me, and with other works it was clear that I would never get permission. It transpired, however, that once an unauthorised work was carried out it would later be legitimised through the simple fact that it had been realised elsewhere and could be authorised solely on that ground (‘Herr Individual geht’, ‘P’, ‘Die Insel’, etc.). The first try-out of a new project – my real ‘art studies’ that I still practise – demands constant openness to the progression of the project and the effects of the intervention. It leads to my repeated playing with perception and taking on the resident’s point of view. Commissioned interventions, then, necessitated a co-operation with institutions or official organisers. Their organisational or financial provision was often connected to serious limitations. Whereas I could develop a conceptually rounded presentation choreography for those works that I realised under my own control, hardly a single intervention in collaboration with official partners ran without conceptually irrelevant negotiations about security, effectiveness (in terms of the publicity interests of the organisers), durability or sustainability (examples that are extremely limiting or laden with expectations are still to be found in many specifications for ‘Per Cent for Art’ competitions today). Art is thereby repeatedly instrumentalised, and also adapted to these expectations and thematic requirements by artist colleagues who are willing to compromise. The artistic horizon of the resulting works often does not go beyond the limited imagination of the client. I try to persuade myself that it is better to have my idiosyncratic proposals rejected because they are regularly accompanied by numerous artistic ideas that could be adequately realised elsewhere with fewer limitations. Enablers Enablers are people who, through their office or because of their private initiative, are able to initiate, accompany and support new art projects. When the funding they have available to realise a project is not their own, it is certainly necessary but not sufficient, something that many project managers misjudge. Many believe that the allocation of meagrely held funds would suffice to develop a new large-scale project. A tangible interest in quality is, however, necessary on the part of the organisers for the joint realisation of the idea (which is not always the case when prominent names are in the game). Without the accompanying attention and discussion, without goodwill for what will for a long time remain obscure, without trust in the result and without the willingness to create the best possible conditions, the finance and publicity oriented enabler will only gather repetitive or imitative art. Not everyone who could be a co-artist considers himself to be such, and least of all the enabler in the exercise of his administrative function. The self-styled super or total artist-maker of large-scale exhibitions often puts together a fascinating obstacle course but usually resorts to art that has already been done*** and are more interest-led compilers than supporters of new developments. They are only enablers in that they can bring their candidates to the attention of other supporters. The deciding moment is that in which I sense that I have aroused an enthusiasm for my proposal in my counterpart. Phone calls, emails and letters led the way in which an invitation was formulated based on knowledge of my previous works. These invitations often contained concealed thematic, formal or economic requirements that needed to be revealed. In these cases I regularly sought to dismantle the predefined framework and to find my own way to approach the situation. With those who allow or even support this, a work is realised every now and then that can go further than the actual work situation and shows me and others perspectives for further development. Luckily I met and still meet such curators, and projects such as the one in Berlin-Moabit can take place, in which 28.33 m3 of public space could temporarily invade an apartment house. * Interventions, unlike installations, are not aligned to a convergent generated and then fixed image. All components of its genesis, its duration, its disappearance as well as its communication are elements and are, when possible, formed by the artist or by participants. It can happen, however, that during the finishing process certain components are made use of without the artist intending it. Its implementation within the art industry means either a post-completion alteration of the project or it takes place, when conceptually reasonable, as a presentation of documents and relicts. In this case secondary material is shown and then often misunderstood amongst expert circles as primary artistic material. ** How does an intervention develop? Apart from professional participants with whom I have intensive exchanges, there is someone I call the Fictional Participant (FP). The FP is my quality controller in the development of an intervention. Depending on the variation, I try to imagine his mind-set towards it. I imagine the FP as a person who is interested in the oddities of the respective environments and who then, for example, stumbles across the information about the16 bollards and stores them in his mental depot as curiosities. In my imagination, I let him come across a strangely positioned traffic bollard or a short tunnel in a house whose oddity he warms to, or he can simply enjoy his own confusion. *** Parallel to determinable presentation and speculation art, an art with completely different parameters developed from the early 1980’s: not the isolated demonstrable and exploitable, sufficient-unto-itself monograph, but works dealing with contemporary ruling conditions, structures and perceptual variants within a changing environment came into focus. Art lovers who still only had their eye on the trading centres and hubs of presentation could take off their blinkers. (Übersetzung: Heather Allen)