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
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
LBLG<br />
P.132<br />
powers of politics, conflicts, and economics — will always demand human material<br />
in order to function, and they will interfere, positively or negatively, in the course of<br />
individual living. This situation calls for developed tools of thinking that may comprise<br />
collective subjectivities and recognise forms of surplus such as conversation, play, and<br />
sympathy. Just like the humorist is a tragic figure, so is the ‘solidaritist’ in particular,<br />
since solidarity about something is a sign of the impossible fullness of society. 3<br />
‘The religious’ may also be that, among the phenomena, that has no name as yet,<br />
but which still addresses one. When Tony Smith, as a prea<strong>mb</strong>le to minimalist art,<br />
went for a drive on the not yet completed New Jersey Turnpike, he experienced a<br />
sense of presence that was ‘socially unrecognised’, and had not yet found its<br />
expression within art. Likewise one might see, with <strong>Haaning</strong>, how the actual situation<br />
of the works transgress the established media of art and ideological superstructures.<br />
It is as if the a<strong>mb</strong>ition is here to let something ‘socially unrecognised’ — some<br />
dynamic, cultural transitional forms — arise within the overlappings between the<br />
various spheres of civilisation. To be able to, or wanting to, look further than what<br />
has been recorded in history or mapped by socialisation, one can write into a tradition<br />
of avantgarde. In <strong>Haaning</strong>’s case one must, however, be careful about e<strong>mb</strong>racing<br />
this without reserve. For although the forms and strategies that his works invoke<br />
are unconventional, seen from the linear, art historical point of view, he is basically<br />
an artist working with the fundamental conditions of the subject. At a time when the<br />
changing of terms pertaining to our lives take place at such speed that one can<br />
hardly speak of a common ground for any length of time, <strong>Haaning</strong>’s works challenge<br />
the sustainability of our representational systems.<br />
The human rights declarations of modernism, proclaiming a global freedom, equality,<br />
and fraternity for all, arose in cultures that — despite all declared intentions to the<br />
contrary — often retained specific markings regarding gender, ethnicity, the insane,<br />
etc. Janet Lyon wrote that manifestoes appear historically near political crises and<br />
moments of social transition involving the definitions of citizenship and political<br />
subjectivity. For the political and artistic avantgarde movements have made<br />
manifest the function of anchoring a certain vocabulary and creating certainty<br />
regarding the justification of collective movements. In this way, the manifesto aspires<br />
to a concrete form of cultural work, although it rarely keeps its promises:<br />
“The manifesto is not always — indeed, not often — to be understood as a causal<br />
agent in history, and though it assumes the voice of vatic authority, it does not create<br />
new social conditions by fiat. My claim for the genre is considerably more modest:<br />
the manifesto occupies a distinct generic space in the arena of public discourse,