download catalogue high resolution pdf (22.3 mb) - Jens Haaning
download catalogue high resolution pdf (22.3 mb) - Jens Haaning
download catalogue high resolution pdf (22.3 mb) - Jens Haaning
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
010<br />
016<br />
JAB<br />
P.108<br />
tacit agreement in Kant — of being "alone together with other people" — is<br />
replaced by direct confrontation.<br />
Ultimately, these confrontations do not lead to consensus but introduce differences<br />
that remain radically incommensurable. Instead of realising a universal community,<br />
each person is left with a limited community and a particular sense of belonging<br />
that simply cannot be shared beyond the community’s immediate me<strong>mb</strong>ers. The<br />
universality of aesthetic judgements and pleasure — which partly depends upon the<br />
absence of a concept for beauty — proves to be an illusion that is suddenly broken<br />
by the real specificity of ethnicity, nationality, language and cultural practises. In<br />
Foreigners Free, the foreign museum visitor is set apart from locals while enjoying<br />
special privileges at their expense. <strong>Haaning</strong>’s joke series provides yet another<br />
example. In particular, Arabic Jokes (1996), paired three jokes written in Arabic<br />
with an image of a topless Danish pin-up girl, which were placed on posters and<br />
distributed throughout Vesterbro, a red light district and ethnically mixed area in<br />
Copenhagen. Danes may be attracted by the naked woman, but the majority of them<br />
cannot understand the jokes, which, again, can be enjoyed only by the Arabic<br />
speaking immigrants who live in the area. The topless woman, offensive to many<br />
Muslims (whether Arabic speaking or not), reaffirms the "openness" and "liberal"<br />
attitudes of Denmark, but these local Danish customs are clearly not extended to<br />
the foreigners who live there and only serve to exploit women for pornography.<br />
While the Arabic jokes are not pointedly racist, the laughter of Arabophones among<br />
each other echoes the laughter of every racist who has made fun of them in the past<br />
for their cultural specificity. Much like the subject of Kantian aesthetics, the individual<br />
who tells racist jokes always claims assent from others by assuming that the joke<br />
will not be offensive to them. 3<br />
While curtailing the universal claims of the Kantian subject — whatever his or her<br />
origins —, <strong>Haaning</strong> also undermines the public museum’s attempts to facilitate<br />
aesthetic judgements and pleasure. By selling consumer goods in the museum and<br />
gallery at discount prices, <strong>Haaning</strong> exploits the autonomy of the art work, only to<br />
destroy it. Super Discount and Travel Agency as well as Trade Bartering (1996),<br />
encourage people to satisfy personal needs instead of pursuing "disinterested<br />
pleasure" by tempting them with an array of objects that have a specific use and<br />
purpose. Trade Bartering perhaps best reflects the equivocal status of an object<br />
that oscillates between art work and commodity. <strong>Haaning</strong> purchased everything<br />
from salami to schnapps in Denmark, imported the goods to Norway and then sold<br />
them as art works at the ticket counter of the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. As vehicles<br />
for creating community, art works are not subject to the import taxes levied on