Stahl, Dr. Johannes, "THE OPENNESS OF MECHANISMS. On the art of Christian Hasucha"

In the 1990s, a tobacco company distributed (in exchange for the usual benefits, of course) umbrellas with the imprint "Come together." What at first looked like a casual and open invitation to meet in the soothing shade of the friendly umbrellas turned out, on closer inspection, to be a very precisely calculated attempt. Smokers in particular were to be endowed with the attribute that was seen to be on the wane in society as a whole: the ability to integrate and the openness of socially competent people. The somewhat bitter irony of the course of history dictates that, under today's legislation, these same smokers must meet as a quasi-fringe group outside restaurant doors, in restrooms, or in even more segregated places.

It is probably no coincidence that it was precisely at this time that Christian Hasucha repeatedly staged his "Encounters" project. Embedded in framework conditions that changed from phase to phase, the constant in each case was the encounter of two people who did not know each other beforehand. Drawn together according to a kind of lottery system, they met at individually determined locations and without further fixed direction. The creative role of the artist consisted largely in defining the basic framework and establishing a kind of controlling. Postcards served as appointment vehicles and subsequently, sent to the artist, provided information as to whether this meeting had actually taken place.

For his part, Hasucha recorded the consummation of this concept in a large-format city map and by affixing inconspicuous commemorative plaques to the respective locations. Like a silent fuel, the project drives perception in the direction of social questions that are as difficult to answer as they are themselves changeable. Nor does Hasucha offer a moral here that is exhausted at the level of "come together." On the contrary, the interaction between the rendezvous partners takes place rather privately. It will develop a wide variety of rules and will hardly become statistically conspicuous in society as a whole. But precisely in this respect, it is a much more experimental and therefore more honest picture of human togetherness. t, information about whether this meeting really took place.

It is a weighty question whether art in general should already suffice in the marking of such gravitational fields, and the answers diverge indeed according to artistic claim and social education. Hasucha's works answer this question quite clearly with a no. He is not interested in the formal side of such fields for no reason. The places where meetings take place, the measurements on site from which the angles of view arise, the length of time a process is allowed to take: these factors are far too important to be left out of the picture. It is precisely spatial thinking that can be used to determine much that must remain open in the social sphere. Therefore, the artist insists on a precise description of the place where these meetings took place. After all, he himself takes a look at them. "All measurements are to be checked on site" - this stamp is on every building plan as an obligation for the builders and architects carrying out the construction. In the interaction that Hasucha establishes with his fellow makers, he is both an architect and, ultimately, an executing and reconstructing documentarian. He leaves the more active part to the audience, and at the same time this social and creative free space also remains without control by the artist. He asks very precisely where it was, but with good reasons hardly what took place socially during the meeting.

In the series of works entitled "Public Interventions," Hasucha prefers to act in areas of public space where careful design is not the primary concern. When he swaps two floor pavings including a boundary fence in Pulheim ("Pulheimer Rochade," 1999), this not only sheds light on the design of 25 square meters of inner-city space, but also on the human and social processes that are in the background of such a material interaction. One 25 square meters are in the parking lot of a secondary school, which is located rather on the outskirts of the city; the other is, in a sense, in the living room of the city, in front of the rather magnificent Benedictine Abbey. The fact that such a process raises dust in a small town makes sense precisely against this social background. Indeed, he links the fundamental question of the character of today's . It links the fundamental question of the character of today's art concepts with the strategy of social interference in social exchange processes. There a - also public - confrontation is pre-programmed, because this art develops a very direct contemporaneity. The regular artistic interventions in the former synagogue, which take place in the same community, have considerably less publicistic headwind.

It could still seem at this point that Christian Hasucha's art is exclusively a thought-obscured field research linked to social concepts. But this would be to underestimate the pleasure the Berlin artist takes in making. Even if the often larger conceptions involve work processes based on division of labor: Hasucha has a workshop van for a reason, equipped as an almost exemplary mobile studio. Working on site in particular requires its own solutions adapted to the artistic concept, and it is often cheaper if the artist can do everything himself, from welding to communications work to printing.

Cf. Project documentation Nr. 24 Encounters