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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HFB<br />
P.122<br />
part of the reality that grants this art legitimacy — the artist makes visual offers to<br />
a society that reacts by demand or by lack of interest. Every work of art pre-exists<br />
as a possibility of staging reality, its realisation is nothing but a formal confirmation.<br />
One may also put it as follows: Art is a claim, which, as a work of art, must<br />
retrospectively assert itself in discourse. However, as this discourse is always led<br />
within one of the aforementioned sub-systems, which differentiate themselves in<br />
the social context, all art belongs to one kind of society or another; it is therefore<br />
dependent on the specific definition of the frame in which art takes place. An<br />
example: Rikrit Tiravanija's kitchenette, which he installed in Berlin in 1992, not<br />
only changed because visitors entered the white cube; due to its social implications,<br />
it also varied from one place to another. Berlin, New York and Paris, or Sao Paulo,<br />
Yokohama and Johannesburg — all of these cities mirror communities that vary in<br />
themselves and to whom Tiravanija's art necessarily had to appear as a project<br />
coded even within one's own culture. In other words: Even if all those cities have a<br />
similar idea of tea-as-drink, the idea of tea-as-art is in the end determined by the<br />
different status of culture. 7 It is, therefore, neither the artist nor his production that<br />
defines the work, but the specific cultural context in which this work is interpreted.<br />
This is the kind of exchange that is happening in times of biennials and migration<br />
movements. Hou Hanru, again, made the following decisive observation concerning<br />
globalisation: "Every city, every region and every nation-state is undergoing decisive<br />
change due to the departure of groups from the local community and the arrival of<br />
others in society. The prerequisites, discourses, ideologies and values in producing<br />
localities have become a completely unknown adventure." 8<br />
This situation has consequences. Merely authorizing what wants to be art does not<br />
work by claiming that art represents the expression of a social counterpart, let<br />
alone of a social whole. A work of art is not in itself the Other; it only enacts<br />
otherness — and it refers to otherness, which is again determined by the respective<br />
counterpart: the US or Asia, religious or multi-cultural state, small town or metropolis,<br />
liberal or conservative — one is always dealing with diverging circumstances. From<br />
the beginning, therefore, art exists in a state of dependence upon one of those<br />
sections, where society must have long before differentiated itself. There is no gap<br />
in the system which was not already intended for art. The sociologist Niklas<br />
Luhmann insistently proved this relation: "The artist himself, therefore, must<br />
observe the emerging work in a way so that he can discern how others will observe<br />
it. In doing so, he cannot know how others — what others? — will take from the<br />
work into their consciousness. But he will include in the work itself something that<br />
guides the expectations of others and will try to surprise them. Only in this way can<br />
the work of art produce astonishment, to put it in the old-fashioned way. Only in this