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
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marginality, madness, since it is about an insane character. Displayed as a poster<br />
which could maybe announce a political meeting or a conference, the work nonetheless<br />
retains, as often in <strong>Haaning</strong>’s work, an allusion to something private yet expressed<br />
in a form that is more than personal. <strong>Jens</strong> <strong>Haaning</strong>’s work almost always contains<br />
autobiographical traces or clues, but they are always very discreet and ungraspable,<br />
at least for those viewers who do not know him personally.<br />
Rejecting personal forms of expression in favor of collective, more than personal<br />
utterances, <strong>Jens</strong> <strong>Haaning</strong>’s work implicitly affirms a close interrelation between<br />
the personal and the political. Speaking about foreigners, for instance, <strong>Jens</strong><br />
<strong>Haaning</strong> has once compared the position of artists in society, and his own in<br />
particular, to the position of immigrants. This is a personal feeling, but inside his<br />
work it translates into more than a personal statement. <strong>Jens</strong> <strong>Haaning</strong>: "In a certain<br />
way, the artist is a kind of marginal figure, and he has things in common with other<br />
marginal figures, such as immigrants. The great difference is that the artist, unlike<br />
the immigrant, works as a medium for society. One thus pays a lot of attention to<br />
what he wants to say with his work or his discourse, while a Muslim, for example,<br />
is rarely asked for his opinion about society." 6<br />
<strong>Jens</strong> <strong>Haaning</strong> turns what at first can be perceived as a weakness into a strength, a<br />
potentially productive resource. He uses this marginal position as a privileged critical<br />
point of view from which to perceive more clearly the conventions, the perceptual<br />
and conceptual habits that constitute the power relations running across the art<br />
institution and society as a whole. Michel Foucault wrote that "a critique is not to<br />
say that things are not the way they should be. It involves seeing on what kind of<br />
obvious facts, familiar things, innate and unreflected modes of thinking the practices<br />
we accept are grounded." 7 Power does not lie outside discourse and representation,<br />
in a few clearly identified and institutional authority figures — public (the State and<br />
its institutions) or private (the corporation) power — as the art which uses<br />
agit-prop assumes. Disseminated on all levels of society, what we call power also<br />
lies in the way people speak or are silent, in the way we look at the other sex, the<br />
insane, or the foreign…<br />
Modernist art has accustomed us to a certain kind of idealization of the figure of the<br />
Other, under the guise of the foreign, the primitive, the child, the insane, etc. It is a<br />
recurrent and constitutive representation of modernist art and criticism. A certain<br />
nu<strong>mb</strong>er of these figures — such as the mentally ill, the outlaw, the alien — return<br />
insistently in <strong>Jens</strong> <strong>Haaning</strong>’s work. But while foreigners, especially in Europe, are<br />
the objects of a form of taboo within representation, which excludes them as subjects,<br />
VPD<br />
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